“Gestures go viral, escaping one painting and contaminating another. A work recurs outside of itself, sometimes in a partial or fragmented way, always coming back remotely as another image—thicker, faster, sharper.” This is how John Kelsey describes the recent work of Christopher Wool. In his essay, he digs into the artist’s intense work on painting process and abstract motifs with all the “side effects” involved. He shows an abstract painter who continues to challenge the boundaries of his medium like hardly any other. Wool’s aesthetic is stark, the paintings mostly in black on a white ground, and even where colors appear they are applied in clear-cut abstractions—erasures, overpaintings, recurring motifs—which frees the painting process to incorporate technological media like silkscreen or digital imaging.

Mark-making in Wool’s paintings creates almost paradoxical representations of abstractions, as Fabrice Hergott, director of the Musée d’Art Moderne, shows in his essay. And John Corbett—who is equally at home in an art context and in avant-garde jazz—explores the two forces of composition and improvisation in the artist’s work, which may afterward undergo a remix treatment comparable to the approach to studio work in dub music.

This book, published on occasion of an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris presenting works from 2000 to 2011, has been designed in close collaboration with the artist himself. It fits the always exceptional tradition of his artist catalogs: there has been no attempt to simply collect the exhibited works in reprographically exact reproductions. Instead the images, held in a brown monochrome, communicate impression and ideas of the paintings and thus create an analog experience to a visit of the exhibition on the printed page.