Today is your last chance to see a good painting show at Christopher Cutts Gallery, one reiterating where the medium is going now, and why it still matters. Andrew Rucklidge (work pictured above) occupies the main space with his encaustic-and-oil works, which, like so many of his contemporaries, fuse abstraction with figuration. Rucklidge wants it both ways, and gets it both ways: he paints industrial or science-fiction landscapes (same difference?), ones identified as such by his broad strokes as well as his blueprint-like etchings onto these strokes. The works are about construction, or rather formation — the most gestural aspects suggesting sublime explosions (their result as well as their occurrence, whether natural or man-made), and the etchings the type of architectural lacing often applied to them. One appreciates this duality not just for conceptual reasons, but for its generous commitment to being looked at. For Rucklidge, poetic accidents are only half of his practice; the other is tireless workmanship — doodles disciplined into patterns, clearly the result of a lot of niggling.

In the second gallery, Drew Simpson’s works are just as principled: Flemish-cum-surrealist-style still lives on wood, each panel of which is divided into several subpanels, like a French window. Any dialogue created with Rucklidge is probably unintentional, but nonetheless present. Despite their divergent styles, both use painting as a means by which to make nature stop, and to dwell on, and then augment, its strangeness.