The title of Keegan Monaghan’s fourth solo show at James Fuentes, IN, is both literal and allusive. On the former front, it describes how these nine works in oil on canvas—each a cropped view of a notched or gridded space, impossible to name (a shelf? a drain? a cornice?) though somehow decisively built in every case—beckon their viewer into vague, hidden interiors. This is complicated by the fact that, despite their humanish scale (seven of the nine are near-square rectangles with sides between four and six feet), their content gives off an optical sense of marked enlargement: Entering them would entail crawling into, say, the gap between paving stones. “In,” of course, implies the “out” where a viewer has to remain.
Such a perceptual limbo opens onto the allusive dimension, which circles the problem of taste. On one hand, Monaghan’s postimpressionist urbanism, his attempt to put the visible sensations of wandering a city down on canvas, is no doubt retrograde, “not in.” The palettes are often pure Pissarro in their beiges, browns, pinks, and blues. A couple tend cl…