Alan Ebnother at Wade Wilson

Alan Ebnother's green paintings at Wade Wilson gallery are nice enough; roughly square pieces of stretched linen with monochrome green paint toweled onto them with the decorative wooliness of cake icing. They're titled with recent dates, I suppose of their manufacture, but in truth they're nothing more nor less than attractive swatches in an interior decorator's book: Lichen, Acid, Sage, Apple, Sargasso, Fir, and Spinach.

How are these different from monochromes by Robert Ryman or Brice Marden? Would I dismiss those as readily if I came across them in a gallery? I stopped to double check. Nope. The carefully clean raw linen edges are a painterly pretension, the tentative, methodical paint application bespeaks mass production, and the goofy a priori choice of different shades of green is marketing.