A moment from a decades-ago conversation with the painter Charles Garabedian (1923-2016) still lingers with me. Describing a painting by Titian, he paused, clenched hands to his chest, shook his head and muttered, “Those paintings were so…so powerful!” This memory of a teacher, overwhelmed by both a painting and the inadequacy of words, has stayed with me since.

One misses this passion today. These days the masters are often reduced to cultural tokens, suitable mainly for riffing on social mores and tastes. My strong hunch is that Garabedian was more in tune with Titian’s actual intentions, sharing the same enthusiasm for visual incident – for events experienced optically, and recreated on canvas according to a discipline that imparted gravity to gestures and pertinence to detail.

While such an approach to painting would hardly be considered cutting-edge today, it remains as accessible as ever to any artist. One contemporary painter clearly inspired by the masters is Deborah Kahn, whose solo exhibition at Orient 15 marks her first in a commercial New York gallery. “Under-recognized” may be a shopworn label, but it’s truly relevant in the case of Kahn, an accomplished artist who has exhibited for several decades in out-of-town and artist-run galleries. Orient 15’s spacious, semi-finished rooms effectively sets off the brisk discipline of her 22 drawings and paintings.

The artist’s heightened colors and fragmented planes recall School of Paris modernism, and, as with the great modernists, the masters serve her as a springboard for pictorial invention. Kahn favors tiered compositions of small, abstracted figures, producing a unique effect: the hieratic regimentation of Egyptian wall painting, suffused with a modernist’s delight in gesture and pigment-generated light. The paintings are driven by narratives, but not by the usual kind of storytelling; rather than recounting the known, they tell the elemental stories of gestures – those of humans, birds, horses, the occasional cow, and often simply unidentifiable shapes.
  
The artist, a first-rate colorist, draws upon our own deep-seated awareness of the workings of light to organize these complex compositions. Ranging from radiant spectral colors to muted greens, blues, browns and grays (the latter covering large areas with surprising eloquence), her colors conjure retiring shadows, humming half-lights, and exuberant highlights. It’s the pressures of these colors, rather than the logic of linear perspective, that turns smaller sequences into tangible presences, and broader ones into swelling spaces.

Kahn favors portal-like compositions, with bands of darker colors framing central, lighter zones. While a face dominates the center foreground of “Portrait” (2022), the individual's arm curls up the shadowed band at right, mirroring a stretching figure, barely visible in its muted hues, at far left. But figures also populate the distant, sunlit landscape in-between, their gestures responding to the staunch gait of a horse. To a remarkable degree every element, lit or shadowed, finds its own rhythmic purpose within a varied, unfolding light.

For instance, in the darkened, bottom-most portion of “The Procession” (2021), vertical figures rise palpably around the horizontal arc of a horse’s back; on the next tier, a third of the way up the canvas, this configuration reoccurs, updated in color and scale. In the uppermost tier, silhouetted against the pale background, a third horse, smaller still, sounds a final echo. The painting recalls the minutely tuned call-and-response one finds in a painting by Bruegel, with its felicitous intwining of expanses and details, the near and the far.

Portions of Kahn’s paintings often feel familiar – haven’t we seen this gesture before, in some masterwork, somewhere? But the six large drawings filling one of the gallery’s rooms make such connections explicit. They combine details from masterworks recognizably by Michelangelo, Delacroix, Courbet and Corot. As true working drawings, they reveal not just Kahn’s technique, but also, I’m convinced, her ever-deepening appreciation. I picture the artist absorbing these masters in prolonged wonder – not unlike my speechless teacher, so many years ago.