Strikingly relevant, Francis Picabia's late paintings at Michael Werner Gallery contextualize the pictorial and theoretical underpinnings of contemporary painting. Picabia, born in 1879, was a part of the same generation as Picasso and Braque, but is usually thought of as a painter who came to maturity after the First World War, especially in conjunction with Dada. Importantly, Picabia spent a significant amount of time in New York City, an experience that informs his work. A close friend of the other great French New Yorker Marcel Duchamp, Picabia’s paintings at Werner has singularly abandoned any pretense to a discussion with the past that characterizes Braque, Matisse and Picasso’s work. Unlike those painters (whose individual work is gorgeously displayed in exhibitions at Acquavella, Eykyn and the Frick, respectively) Picabia’s paintings do not revolutionize, or even consider, the past. Picabia’s pictorial thinking is weaker than his more abundantly gifted peers. While Picasso, Braque and Matisse reinvented Western painting, Picabia flitted from one received style to another. Around the time Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles, for instance, Picabia was showing the Influence of the second rate Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. Later, Picabia joined the Groupe de Puteaux, a collection of painters based in Suburban Paris who practiced what Guillaume Apollinaire termed ‘Orphism’ which was a derivation of Cubism that Picasso in turn dismissively labeled ‘Salon Cubism’. The Cubism practiced by Picasso and Braque, strikingly Classical, would not look out of place next to a Roman torso fragment. Picabia’s Orphism, meanwhile, could comfortably hide behind a diamond tennis bracelet in a Tiffany’s window display. Picabia’s talent, instead, is not how he internalizes the past, but in how he utilizes the present. Displayed at Werner are Picabia’s ‘transparent’ paintings that used non-traditional techniques such as different glazes and opacities to make densely layered, collaged images. Going one step further by breaking Pop-conceptual ground, Picabia began to use girly magazines and other popular media of the day as source material for his paintings. Resembling popular illustrations, pin-up calendars or Fascist dream-erotica propaganda, these paintings spiritually borrow from the maudlin, sentimental and trivial as aesthetic starting points. Serious in intention, these images are gleefully irreverent in composition and attitude. Brash, silly and giddy, Picabia’s paintings are quintessentially New Yorker in manner and disposition. Picabia’s paintings, dangerously, say, ‘This is a lie’, and more dangerous still, ‘I am untroubled by the lie.’ Unmooring himself from pictorial responsibility, Picabia opened the door to our own current, untethered condition.