Mary Heilmann: 303 Gallery.

Bertolt Brecht was no fan of abstraction. Worthless as a radical political tool, non-figurative art was, in the Marxist playwright's eyes, little more than aesthetic scaffolding supporting upper-class pleasures. An abstract composition might as well be a blank screen for psychological projection, eliciting unearned emotional responses. "You paint ... an indeterminate red; and some cry at the sight of this indeterminate red because they think of a rose, and others because they think of a child lacerated by bombs and streaming with blood," Brecht wrote in his Notebooks (1935-39). And yet, while ostensibly directing his comments toward the hazards inherent to nonobjective painting, he inadvertently revealed the target of his anxiety to be less abstraction than color. It was, after all, red (rather than the field it marked) that wielded the power to suggest romance and horror in one fell swoop.

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Such a slippage--from abstraction to color or, perhaps, between abstraction and color--uncannily describes the work of Mary Heilmann, who has, for some thirty years, confounded the various persecutions levied against abstract painting. Yet, while she certainly conjures the ghost of abstractions past, Heilmann's language is less abstraction per se than a color-gorged, visual pig-Latin version of it. A female artist who came of age during the gender-troubled '60s and '70s, Heilmann has consistently leaned on notions of the self-contained, reduced object, coaxing siren songs from rectangles, circles, and squares. Even now, her diverse canvases are habitually characterized as "playful," "light," and "cheeky," words that just barely sidestep the less-benign "decorative" or "feminine."

Assuming no single named "style," Heilmann critically cites the effects and affects of the cliches of modernism and Minimalism but never with the intention of doing away with either. Rather, her evocations reveal what is true of any act of perpetuation: Repetition enables the return of the repressed. If Brecht saw the (unwelcome) subversive element of abstraction as enabling unjustified and unproductive sentiment, Heilmann seizes on and magnifies this emotive potential. Indeed, Heilmann's counterintuitively political tactic is to continually play up the deeply personal relationship between painting and viewer, to say nothing of painting and painter.

Heilmann's latest exhibition (and her first at 303 Gallery) was titled "Heaven & Hell," a title that evokes myriad musical references--from the Temptations to the Who--but also recalls Aldous Huxley's Blake-inspired meditation on spirituality, perception, and mescaline. Huxley's road to heightened perception takes on a particular resonance in a gallery full of Heilmann's perverse, breathtaking canvases, which suggest that the only substance needed for transport is deftly handled pigment. Baby Snake, 2004, is an expanse of lime green ground traversed willy-nilly by lines that literally carve their way, exposing multiple layers of paint, to form torqued geometric shapes. Hokusai, 2004, a diptych, joins one panel--in which twenty imperfect, not-quite-primary-colored rectangles beckon like doorways, while a single black rectangle takes on the resonance of a black hole--with another panel of overlapping, lyrical wave shapes, the swells piled one upon the next in coagulated motion.

In every work here, abstraction threatens to slide into anthropomorphism or narrative, an impulse often encouraged by suggestive titles like the Bob Dylan--derived Blood on the Tracks, 2005. Disavowing abstraction's breach with "meaning," Heilmann unabashedly posits subjective response as the literal blush creeping up every painting's cheeks. In the back gallery, an uncharacteristic canvas delivered a delicate whirl of sea green and sky blue, a scrim of fluffy white, and an ever-so-slight touch of lilac. Almost embarrassingly (in the best sense) titled Heaven, 2004, and containing not a single hard-edge line, the piece was appropriately accompanied by Clubchair 23 and Clubchair 24 (both 2005), items of chunky, handmade furniture constructed from painted wood and the polypropylene webbing found on folding beach chairs. Sit back and enjoy the view, the artist seemed to say; who knows what you'll discover?