In Deborah Zlotsky’s new paintings, forms occupy a charged space that has been worked over and over again, navigating the interstices of past, present, and future. The exhibition title, which comes from a line in the poem Could Have by Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), emphasizes a fusion between what has happened and imagining what might be.

Zlotsky begins each painting with something incidental and personal — a few colors or shapes, a memory of a tangled pile of laundry or the movement of sunlight through her grandmother’s apartment. From there, she responds to relationships and discovers unanticipated proximities that fuel her decisions: correcting, repairing, adjusting, and connecting parts in a responsive process of accumulation and revision.

Zlotsky’s language of forms and planes play with our assumptions. Some may appear solid, others hollow. Still others appear as open boxes, flaps out, or cubes stacked on top of one another. Our perspective is constantly challenged. Bold, unexpected colors punctuate the work and contribute to the dynamic space. In each torqued rectangle, another moment is revealed. Hints of underpainting, opaque planes and ghostly forms reveal histories of reversals, accidents and change. Drips and smears also mark time, leaving a visible trace of the artist’s hand. The paintings seem to have no beginning or end, with idiosyncratic forms flowing between flat and more dimensional space. Zlotsky draws us into a world where everything is connected.