Philadelphia artist Douglas Witmer curated the current exhibit at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (a Knight Arts grantee) as a summer show first and foremost. Entitled “Ice Water Flyswatter,” this grouping of artists from around the country and Europe explores the nature of precise design while also offering a bright and lively smattering of paintings and forms that still manage to seem playful despite their exacting compositions.

Donald Martiny, “Yukpa.”

Largest and most immediately impressive is Donald Martiny’s gigantic swath of smeared paint, which references both two- and three-dimensional media in two swift (huge) brushstrokes. The artist actually slid an oversized paintbrush to create the piece, although the bumpy painting/sculpture attaches just an inch or two from the wall, casting a slight shadow around itself – the only betrayal that it is not, in fact, pigment directly applied to the surface. Its own surface, however, mimics the ripples of freshly spread paint, magnified into an abnormally wide field of tropical mango-orange. The only other explanation for this anomaly would be a smoothie doused sloppily against the wall… but that seems like a rather poor use of a smoothie.

Cary Smith, “Splat #25 (Green).”

Cary Smith’s inclusion is a blob-like white shape pushing its way out of a field of leafy green. Although the left side of the white area is right-angled and columnar, the right side is something like a sprouting plant with bulbous little leaf protrusions around a central stem. This abstraction takes its greatest departure from the plant kingdom in its inverse color scheme, white on green instead of chlorophyl-laden structures as the positive space.

Paige Williams, “Hardly Noticed.”

The play amongst vertical, horizontal and diagonal ties three artists’ work together with a common directional theme. Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst provides very minimal compositions of red and blue rectangles. Even where the bars are vertical, some are cut at sharp diagonals, and elsewhere similar red boxes pitch completely against the perpendicular planes. Paige Williams lies comparably shaped rectangles into a horizontal structure whose blues, pinks and oranges seem more like a summertime sunset than a constructivist painting like Biltereyst’s. Mark Wethil, on the other hand, overlays boxes in the vertical, many of them mirroring one another in a frame-like, self-referential series.

Mary Bucci McCoy deviates the most from the show’s other images, although her extremely simple ovals on a light blue square are somewhat reminiscent of Cary Smith’s work. Like a nearly cloudless sky, her artwork is calming, sparse and, in a way, hardly noticeable. It is silent and, like the sky, seems to fit mostly because of its inherent ability to seem natural and fitting practically anywhere.

All six artists and an accompanying poem/drawing by Ian White Williams will be on display at Tiger Strikes Asteroid through August 31.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is located at 319 North 11th St., Philadelphia; [email protected]; philadelphia.tigerstrikesasteroid.com.