Albert Oehlen's paintings are neither beautiful nor seductive. Their self-consciously brutal surfaces seem to be corrupted from within, a perversion of the paintings they might have been.

In Descending Hot Rays, Oehlen's monotone canvas occupies a space between representation and abstraction, his forms and textures converging not to create an illusion, but a suggestion of invention.

Traditional painterly expression is infused with a steely reference to technology. His work offers a raw confrontation with the deficiencies of visual language. Oehlen doesn't use paint to convey meaning, but rather to explore the possibilities of the medium's ‘function'.