For his third solo exhibition at Triple Base in San Francisco, Jay Nelson has masked the entire gallery floor with hand cut, custom shaped panels of ACX plywood. He’s divided the space with a new wall, and installed two separate arrangements of recent works in traditional, consciously transparent orderings. Nelson’s constructed all the necessary tools of perception (the wall, the work, even the floor) and pieced it all together to create an abstraction that according to the artist, was developed “with as little intention as possible.”

The exhibition begins with fifteen small works on paper grouped together in the three rows of five. Nelson’s decision to consolidate the drawings that make up “Abstract Composition 1-15” into one entity is important. Individually they are systematic illustrations arranging and rearranging the visual anatomy of the plywood. But as a network, the drawings go a step further and reveal the basic mechanisms for navigating the rest of the work.

While everything in the show was forged in a mirrored logic, the real winners are Nelson’s paintings. In the paintings, unlike in the rest of the work, Nelson’s purposeful disregard of intention moves past any system of omission. Made without external influence, the paintings begin to play at the intimate inner workings of the psyche. They are visually engaging, and transcend their own object-hood through a materially sound testimony of the self.