The easy reading of Benglis is excess: glitter, gold, the body, the pour. The better reading is procedural. Knot, tie and fold are operations anyone can perform on a sheet of mesh. What she adds is a refusal to let the operation stay plain. Every surface gets pushed to an extreme; in her own words, her work “swings back and forth between extremes of coloration and texturing.”

The folds are there to catch light. Of the pleated works she has said that “the light, and the change of light, was a goal.” Walk past one slowly and the same pleat reads as two different surfaces, dark from one side and lit from the other. That is an architect’s lesson as much as a sculptor’s. A fold is the cheapest way to make a flat sheet stand up, and the cheapest way to put light to work. The show is worth the trip for watching one artist test that idea for fifty years in mesh, glass, clay and bronze without ever exhausting it.

A louvre is a device for being partly open. It lets air and light through while blocking the view. Begum treats that small, everyday piece of building hardware as a subject. The gallery says the series came out of a decade of experiment and research, and that its theme is permeability.

That makes this the most architectural stop on the walk and the one most at the mercy of conditions. The gallery describes the works as “ethereal and elusive” at times, shifting “with changing conditions before resolving into more defined and solid forms.” Take that as an instruction. Look from an angle, then head-on, then come back when the light has moved. Benglis folds a sheet to make a surface. Begum repeats a standard part to make a filter. A louvre only reads as a louvre once there are enough slats, so the repetition is the point.

Poured abstraction usually gets described in terms of feeling: soak, glow, breath. Vecsey’s gallery describes a schedule, and the schedule is the better way in. With one pour a day, the painting builds up in layers, session by session. The texture of the linen, not a brush, has a large say in where each pour settles. The release says she works “responding to the character of the linen surface.”

The result is quiet, and a rule earned the quiet. Look for the edges where one layer sits over the one before it. Those edges are the days.

A key is a strange thing to paint, because all of its meaning sits in its outline. The bow is decoration and the cut is information. The release gets it exactly: each canvas is “a singular modification of a template, like keys themselves.” That turns the series into a working model of authorship in a reproducible system. The blank is standard, the cut is specific, and being copied is the whole point. The uncut diptych is the quiet center of the show: two keys before they open anything.

Then comes the harder line in the release. In a city where space is “precarious and increasingly out of reach,” a key is a kind of currency, and a whole economy of locksmiths and duplication shops exists because “a key exists to be copied.” The smiley-face key holds the show’s feeling. It stands for a door someone opened when he needed one, and it describes a New York that is getting harder to find.

This stop is a palate cleanser, not part of the walk’s argument. The release frames the work around “instinct and craft” and a “spontaneous response to the work as it progresses.” That is the opposite pole from the rule-bound work up the street. It’s worth a short visit for the contrast. Observational painting is a procedure too. It just hides its steps.