Art can sometimes enter into a rarefied conversation with art theory and art history. It must reach outside that box with beauty, freshness, or wit to succeed. Two artists working within today’s rubric of painting have shows up now: Jeff Perrott at LaMontagne Gallery and Michael Krueger at Steven Zevitas Gallery.

Perrott, who is both painterly and conceptual, continues his abstract “Random Walk” series. He showed a previous iteration at LaMontagne in 2010. Perrott uses an arbitrary system to direct the course of each brush stroke, working hand in hand with chance. The paintings strive to marry two opposites: the dice-thrower’s indeterminism championed by composer John Cage, which in essence removed the artist’s hand from the composition, and the lush materiality of action painting, which romanticized the artist’s hand.