Like Cézanne, Ablow toys with the construction of space. Ablow paints objects on the brink of chaos and objects that appear as if they could collapse on themselves any moment. Coupled with their stability, this tension is what brings the viewer back, spell-bound, to Ablow’s work.

The most striking development in Ablow's recent work is in its unorthodox, ethereal color. While his previous works were mostly painted in shades of chalky beige and rose with a careful accumulation of paint layers, (a derivative of the direct color technique he learned from Oskar Kokoschka), these paintings glow with blues worthy of Picasso’s Blue Period and warm coppers worthy of Georgia O’Keefe’s canyons. In works like “The Mantle” and “Tuscan Shadows” Ablow’s objects are suffused with a ghostly iridescence. The color in the smaller gouaches, however, is not as successful, and the glaring colors sometimes clash in a muddy jumble.

Ablow turned to painting still lifes after early unsuccessful bouts with epic scenes of Greek mythology. After receiving his M.A. in Art History at Harvard in 1955, painting still lifes offered him the attraction of “studying the visible world within a controlled and concentrated situation.” Ablow also said that painting still lifes offered, “the possibility of problems with clearly defined solutions.”

Once involved in his new project, however, Ablow found that this view was an belittling over-simplification. “Because the objects are inanimate does not mean they are still, and because the objects have been arranged by the artist it does not ensure his control over the world they become,” Ablow said, “What was to have been for me a subject only for study, became an engulfing involvement with a world that, for all its stillness, was elusive, mysterious and open.”

Joseph Ablow’s “Recent Paintings” will be on view at the Pucker Gallery (171 Newbury Street, Boston) through May 23. For more information, please see www.puckergallery.com.