Painter, writer, teacher, and publisher: Peter Halley has been a widely influential figure in the international art world since his bold canvases were first shown in the early 1980s. Emerging from the East Village Neo-Geo scene, Halley soon became known for his aggressively colored Day-Glo paintings of square "cells" and rectilinear "conduits," titled with references ranging from the erudite to the pop.<BR>While his paintings may initially recall the abstractions of Newman, Mondrian, and Albers, Halley's work breaks with the modernist agenda by insisting on a figurative referent, and, as curator and critic Dan Cameron has noted, Halley "effectively restate[s] the terms of abstraction in our time." For Halley, geometry is a profoundly social fact and his paintings are diagrams of the experience of space and time in contemporary society, depictions of loneliness and of connection.