PETER YOUNG - "Paintings" - NYTimes.com 71 Morton Street, near Hudson Street, West Village New York is slowly catching up with Peter Young, the Post-Minimal painter and erstwhile New Yorker who has lived and worked in Arizona since 1972. Five years ago an exhibition at MoMA PS1 reviewed Mr. Young's elegantly varied, process-oriented abstractions from 1963 to 1977, while a concurrent show at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea included works from 1972 to 1980. Mr. Algus has since joined forces with Amy Greenspon, and they are presenting eight canvases from a 1996-98 series; the paintings show Mr. Young as involved as ever with self-evident techniques, stylish nonchalance and mixed optical and cultural messages. These paintings result from a nearly transparent triple-tiered process, beginning with a scattering of loose, watercolor-thin, sometimes de Kooningesque brushwork. Over this is added - lightly drawn in pencil using stencils - a faint, woozy, geometric lattice of intersecting circles and ellipses. Finally some of the curved shapes created by these intersections are filled in with white paint. Finito. The process reads as trancelike and autonomist; the effect is delicately hallucinatory, like a mirage seen through clouds or smoke, as well as an unusually simple joining of geometry and gesture. Two horizontal paintings can suggest bird's-eye views of a vast, disintegrating Cézanne landscape. Several vertical works that relegate the pencil work to half of the canvas or limit color, or both, are especially effective, like expanded doodles unafraid to take on Pollock. Robert Motherwell once said that painters carry the history of their medium in their heads. Mr. Young seems to carry it in his hands, freely, restlessly and without pretense. Here's hoping New York doesn't have to wait another five years for his next update.