Like a concept album or a marvel of structural engineering, this exhibition is greater than the sum of its parts; each canvas ineluctably reinforces all of the others. Elegantly installed in the Renaissance Society's double-height galleries, it comprises a decade's output by painter Scott Short, who has spent the majority of this time doggedly fleshing out a single, restrictive concept. The artist makes successive black-and-white photocopies of unmarked sheets of colored construction paper, until the final image—removed from the original by hundreds of generations and chosen for its visual properties—is an abstract field of marks. This image is then projected onto canvas and meticulously copied in oil paint. Some will feel impatient simply reading that description. But taken whole, this extreme constraint provides relative bounty: Spatters are arranged in divergent compositions—black on white or white on black, depending on their density and one's inclination—and buttressed by the paradoxical dualities embedded in the artist's process. The paintings are both abstract and pedantically representational; are made mechanically and, painstakingly, by hand; are black-and-white but generate cognitive friction with titles like Untitled (yellow) and Untitled (red). A few earlier "portraits" are thick, swirling scrawls of black paint that blot out any attempt at identification. To arrive at his working process, a frozen inversion of Abstract Expressionism's messy heat, Short has likewise obliterated the traditional habits of a "painterly" practice. That these canvases still work precisely as paintings is evidence of the fundamental stability of his method.