As an artist myself, I don't take it lightly when I get to stand in front of five decades of someone's work and still feel surprised by it. That's exactly what happened the first time I really spent time with Richard Taddei's paintings — figures that seem to dissolve and reassemble themselves right in front of you, classical bodies seen through fractured planes of glass. It's rare to find work that's this disciplined and this unruly at the same time.

Richard trained as an architect before he ever called himself a painter, apprenticed under Edward Melcarth in the late 1960s, and has spent the decades since pulling the male figure apart and putting it back together in his own language — part Renaissance light, part Cubist geometry, part beach memory from a Long Island childhood. Muscle Memories, his show at the gallery, is where all of that finally lands in one place…