Three New York Shows This Week Where Painting Refuses to Stay Flat

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 20, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Three New York Shows This Week Where Painting Refuses to Stay Flat At a Glance Carol Rama, Firelei Báez and Julian Schnabel all opened in Chelsea within four days of each other, and the three shows share one surface logic worth crossing town for. Walk into the back room of Hauser & Wirth’s first floor right now and one painting takes the entire wall. Eight panels of it, the colour poured rather than brushed, pooling from tropical warmth at one end into Arctic white at the other. That is Firelei Báez’s “View of Nature,” and it opened on May 12 as part of a week in Chelsea that, looked at together, says something specific about where painting is going. Three shows opened within four days. Báez and Carol Rama at Hauser & Wirth on May 12. Julian Schnabel at Pace on May 15. I went looking for what connected them, and it is not subject, not generation, not nationality. It is the surface. None of these painters lets the paint lie flat. What ties Carol Rama, Firelei Báez and Julian Schnabel this week Rama’s show, “I See You You See Me,” is Hauser & Wirth’s first survey of her, pulling work from 1947 to 1998. Six decades of a painter who treated the canvas as somewhere to attach things: rubber, doll eyes, textile, bricolage. Paint and object, never quite separable. Báez pours. The gallery describes “View of Nature” plainly, as “an eight-panel painting stretching across the entire back wall of the gallery’s first floor, based upon John Emslie’s 1852 engraving.” Poured paint finds its own edges. The painter sets the conditions and then negotiates what the liquid did. Schnabel, in “Italy Through Its Trees,” is back to the plate painting s he started in 1978. He fixes shattered crockery to the canvas first, a broken relief, then paints across it. He told the press what that ground gives him: “I gave them a ground of Naples yellow, then between the blue and the Naples yellow, I could deal with whatever the sky became.” Three painters, three methods, one refusal. The flat plane is not where any of them works. The painter’s test: walk in and check the light Here is the thing a review of these shows rarely mentions. A built surface lives or dies on the light hitting it. Flat, even museum light is the enemy of a built surface. Schnabel’s broken plates need a raking, directional light to throw real shadows off their ridges. Light them flat and the crockery turns to visual noise, a busy texture instead of a structure. Rama’s attached objects are the same: the relief has to cast a shadow to register as relief. Even Báez’s poured fields carry a low topography, the slight ridge left where one pour met another, and side light is what finds it. So when you walk into each of these rooms, look at the light before looking at the picture. Check whether the gallery hung the work to catch a rake or washed it flat. Hauser & Wirth and Pace both know how to light a relief surface. It is still the first thing a painter checks, becaus