Michael David may be the most innovative master of immediate surface since the Abstract Expressionists. He has acknowledged his debt to Abstract Expressionism, but he has transformed it. Where the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the forties and fifties seem like modern cave paintings, as their crude, unfocused, often meandering, turbulent painterliness suggests, David seeks to reinstate prehistory, turning the cave into a temple. His more concentrated, dense and contemplative paintings have the aura of post history. David’s abstract paintings renew immediacy; they reconstitute and strengthen, even apotheosize it. They raise it to a feverishly fresh intensity with their remarkable touch, indicating they are among the very best painterly abstractions made.