Slight Return is an exhibition of new paintings by Ned Evans presented in the context of work from the past 30 years. A native of Southern California and a life-long surfer, Evans’ abstract paintings parallel that experience in their wet, Frankenthaler flows, counterposed with solid bars of rhythmic rolls. Undulations and saturations are crisply divided by vertical stripes that suggest time markers gliding across a screen. An architectonic structure underlies even his most fluid works. In earlier paintings, columns of color and geometric building blocks of composition were in fact, partially inspired by simple brick and board shacks he encountered while surfing in locales like El Salvador and Morocco. Evans’ use of striped cotton ticking as well as raw wood, suggest the idea of painting as collage, bordering on Rauschenberg assemblage. The color fields of Ned Evans are grounded in a construction as solid as the American flag or the interlocking planes of Sean Scully.