The first time I saw Robert Nadeau's paintings in 2006 I was drunk and I didn't like them. “Another opening night in Chelsea,” I thought. The next weekend I returned to Mixed Greens, sober and with a clearer mind. My impression of the painter’s work took a turn for the better.

His stacked lines of paint mesmerized me. They held a colorful vibrancy that exhibited only a moment of linearity before bleeding south, to join their parallel neighbors below. It seemed like a relatively orderly system. Or so I thought.

When I attended the opening for his new show, Heavy Chalk, I wasn't drunk, but the paintings, if human, might have been. They were drunk, angry, unpredictable, and blown out, but they were also raw, fresh, and beautiful. The untidy bleeding that began in the last show had made the leap into a full-on hemorrhage. I stood in the middle of the gallery thinking, "What happened?"

Gone was the controlled system or color grid of the last show. Although color was still handled expertly, you’d be just as likely to find chromatic dissonance in one painting, followed by harmonious grays, blacks, and whites in the next. The grid I found at Mixed Greens was shattered. Now, Nadeau’s lines swooped and screamed in whatever direction they desired.

The paintings in Heavy Chalk are an exhilarating exercise in intuition. Through an email correspondence, the artist told me the series sprang from daily studio exercises involving small gouaches.  When he finally let loose on larger canvases, he used the prevailing playfulness of the gouaches, but with heavier compositional rigor. As wild and explosive as these paintings are, it’s the command of composition that marks Nadeau’s work.

Seeing the show a second time, the answer to my question, “What happened?” was clearer this time: Everything. Every single possible thing happened. That’s when I realized that these aren’t paintings as much as they’re mirrors reflecting the ever-messy human heart and all the Everything it can hold.

Heavy Chalk is up at Mixed Greens through May 23rd.