Leelee Kimmel (b. 1983, New York) makes abstract paintings, but most abstraction, even very severe and reductionist abstraction, admits figments of representation. Think of the ways the rectangle connotes a door or a window. In her essay “Grids”, Rosalind Krauss takes the window in one of Odilon Redon’s symbolist works as a stepping off: the window grid then underlying works so seemingly removed from Redon’s, like Mondrian’s mature Neo-plasticist paintings. “Pure” paintings, reductions, abstractions. And yet did Mondrian ever disavow their background in Symbolism? The haunted trees of his earlier theosophy-soaked works become ever more disembodied, “de-treed” as it were, and yet remain lurking spectral presences.