Abstract art can be tough for some to appreciate. You have to ponder it, think on it and stew on it before you start to comprehend it. You have to look past its surface and try and peer into the artist’s mind to determine his purpose. And you are probably one of two minds: either you love to do this, or you don’t. For those who do, Matthew Langley’s Paintings + Paperworks now at DCAC, is a good bet.

Curated by J.W. Mahoney, of retired Hirshhorn fame, the DCAC Gallery is thick with the cloying smell of oil paint. This thick smell is a precursor to the thick layers of paint that adorn Langley’s canvases. His work is minimal in that his compositions are thick grids, carved out with a palette knife and rich with texture and color.

Langley's work is shown in two different mediums oil paint, and paper with acrylic. Blocks of color create his compositions and all of his paintings share the grid as theme and are highly textured with layers upon layers of color. His work ranges from simpler imagery in The Backyard, where his squares are more opaque and flat, to the more complex in The Sunflower, where palette knife marks reveal short, sharp rainbows underneath a deep aquamarine blue.

While not the most aesthetically pleasing piece, The Agony of Gagarin is his most compelling. Thick black squares surround one bloody orange square, isolating it in the middle of the canvas. It is gritty and jarring, his agony obvious.

The most dynamic piece is In Between Words (pictured). The canvas is a large grid washed in a white overlay, concealing squares of orange, blue and brown. These colors peek through rough patches of white. A single bright, opaque spring-green square at the bottom center screams for your attention. It is up to the viewer to determine which of the elements represents the silence between the words. Is it in the calm of the white or the commotion of the green?

His paper canvases are smaller renditions of his oils. Paper is painted in layers of acrylic, then cut up and rearranged into grids. These grids are in contrast with his oil paintings as the sides of the squares are not straight lines but are imperfect, leaving small amounts of white space between the squares. It gives these works a messy, unprofessional and unfinished feel.

I Bid You Goodnight is the most interesting of his works created out of paper. The composition consists of small squares of green, yellow and blue which work well together as contrasting colors. In a middle section of blue squares, a darker wash overlaps and draws your eye away from the brightness of the yellow and the dullness of the green to a more interesting emphasis within the composition. The color choice recalls a street at dusk, falling into shadow and a fond farewell.

In Between Words, courtesy of the artist's web site.

Matthew Langley's Paintings + Paperworks is on display until February 18. The District of Colombia Arts Center is located at 2438 18th St NW and is open Wednesday through Sunday, 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.