Svenja Deininger’s current show at Marianne Boesky Gallery has a quietness to it, an air of minding its own business that can be initially disarming. From a distance, the geometric abstractions look as pristine and empty as the gallery’s walls: no external references, no critical provocations, nor expressive painterly effects—nothing, it seems, to hold the viewer’s attention at all. But with closer views, their formal goals become quite clear. Each painting plays various perceptual elements against each other, balancing opacity against transparency, turning surface into depth. Mass open spaces are girded with lines, and abstraction is held in captivity, on the brink of representational possibility. “One Second Balance” is the Vienna-based painter’s first solo exhibition in New York, with fourteen untitled works all made in the previous year. The work is installed to form a possible trajectory through Deininger’s process, with one canvas often introducing a motif or element that is reprised in the next, in a limited palette of blacks, blues, greens, and pinks. The change of scale between the works only serves to further emphasize nuanced compositional details: as the viewer draws closer, what initially appeared to be virgin white matte space turns out have multiple layers and planes, …