Artist Lisa Corinne Davis has successfully reimagined geometric abstraction for the contemporary digital era with her current exhibition "Syllogism" at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan. The show demonstrates how Davis has evolved her artistic practice to address the complex systems and networks that define modern life, creating a visual language that speaks to our age of information overload and growing social disparity.

Five years ago, Davis exhibited "All Shook Up" at the now-closed Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York, where her geometric abstractions explored the interconnected systems shaping our daily lives. While that earlier work showed promise, critics felt the structural arrangements and their relationships lacked sufficient force and cohesion. However, her current exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery has laid those concerns to rest with a more convincing and exciting body of work.

Davis has expanded the possibilities of geometric abstraction into territory defined by digital systems, algorithms, flow charts, and diagrams. Her paintings create a visual realm that alludes to the measurement and prediction of human behavior in our increasingly digitized world. She achieves this through a sophisticated vocabulary composed of distinct abstract languages, each featuring similar color palettes and repeating units including open, unstable grids, various geometric shapes, lines and bands, and puzzle-like forms.

Working almost exclusively in oil on canvas, Davis layers one open system over another, ensuring no single element dominates while allowing different systems to disrupt and infiltrate each other. The figure-ground relationship in her paintings is both nuanced and contentious, as multiple visual systems compete for viewers' attention. This creates compositions that are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, reflecting the complexity of contemporary life.

The paintings resist singular interpretation, welcoming multiple narratives without settling into one definitive storyline. Viewers might read them biographically, as maps, as commentary on our collective dependency on computers, or as political statements about the comfort of ideological identification. Works like "Dogmatic Deceit" (2025) inspire numerous associations simultaneously, demonstrating Davis's success in making geometric abstraction relevant to our rapidly changing times.

While these are contemplative, inviting paintings that reward slow viewing, they teem with activity on every level. "Convulsive Calculation" (2025) exemplifies Davis's complex approach, incorporating rectangles and wavy lines that might recall Sol LeWitt's work from the mid-1990s while creating something entirely unprecedented in contemporary abstraction. The composition features rectangles divided into three color groups - white, cerulean blue, and dark greenish blue - set against a green-yellow ground that changes almost imperceptibly.

In "Convulsive Calculation," dark rectangles parallel to the painting's edges function as visual anchors amid the activity of wavy lines and smaller cerulean and white rectangles overlaying them at different angles. The densely packed cerulean rectangles appear to rush upward or slide down from the lower right corner, while a wide diagonal swath of white rectangles seems to either meet them or move away. Larger cerulean shapes form a triangle in the upper left corner, cordoning off the white elements in a composition that verges on incoherence and information overload.

This sense of approaching chaos reflects what makes Davis's work so compelling. She presents viewers with a world they know exists but seldom see up close - a beautiful, multicolored system populated by familiar geometric shapes, lines, and grids that don't usually feel threatening. However, in her paintings, everything teeters on the edge of overwhelming complexity, evoking William Wordsworth's observation in "The World Is Too Much With Us" about how modern life distances us from nature and authentic experience.

Davis's meticulously crafted paintings speak directly to our contemporary moment, characterized by simultaneous information overload and growing disparity. They address an age where the gap between language and meaning, and between rich and poor, widens by the hour. Her work demonstrates how traditional abstract painting can be transformed to address uniquely contemporary concerns while maintaining the medium's essential qualities.

"Lisa Corinne Davis: Syllogism" continues at Miles McEnery Gallery, located at 525 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, Manhattan, through October 25. The exhibition showcases how geometric abstraction can remain vital and relevant in addressing the complexities of digital-age existence, proving that traditional artistic approaches can evolve to meet contemporary challenges.