The Green Gallery welcomes Dive Bar Loops / Five Bar Loops, Nolan Simon's second exhibition with us in eleven years.

Eight paintings reimagined a seat at a bar after the occupant has left — finished drinks, a champagne cork, egg shells, a dried lime. Everything is painted to scale and rests along the bottom edge of the canvases which are hung at bar height. Standing in front of them puts you where the last person sat: a leftover moment waiting on the next encounter.

Simon's glass and smoke are rendered with a crispness borrowed from seventeenth-century Dutch and Italian still life, set against black grounds worked into a faux wood grain or pitted like craters — blunt dimensionality against the faux-3D objects. In each scene light emanates from an unseen overhead bar lamp, and past its reach there's nothing. The dried lime tells us time has passed. An occasional cigarette in a prosthetic ear tips these arrangements into erotic pareidolia.

The dreamlike matter-of-factness has a local…