Then Gilliam started to pun on this effect. He began attaching enameled aluminum elements to the edges of his paintings — actual three-dimensional forms that were small at first in simple geometric shapes, then larger and more complicated. For the most part, the surfaces of these projecting elements were smooth, making them — paradoxically — seem flatter than the painted surfaces to which they were attached.

In 1990 Gilliam had occasion to execute a number of actual sculptures; some of them against a wall, as in the Davis Square Subway Station in Boston, some of them suspended in space, like the Library of the University of Louisville. Using the same geometric shapes as in the paintings and combining them in the same way, Gilliam brought these sculptures to the brink of chaos by building them out dramatically into space, using color sometimes poured onto the surface to intensify the three-dimensional effect.

Gilliam’s 1990s works marry the sculpture to the painting. They combine shaped canvases, no longer quilted, but still patterned with raked masses of acrylic and gel, with cut-out aluminum elements, circles, broken circles, and perforated cones that seem to float in front of them. These projected elements are now heavily painted and textured, bearing the same raked surfaces and the same lush colors as the canvas behind them. The sculptural elements are thereby brought under some measure of control, and made to cohere with the painted surface. They are also dispersed across the painting rather than clustered at the edge or in the center as in many of Gilliam’s previous works. This reinforces the coherence Gilliam achieves through chromatic and textural consistency.

Thus much has changed in Gilliam’s work; but much has stayed the same. Within a somewhat more controlled idiom, his paintings still achieve that tense equilibrium between the regularizing influence of geometry and the explosive power of color and texture. There is something in Gilliam that loves a struggle and, here, as often in the best of his work, it lies in the effort to reconcile a cool intellectual structure with a richly expressive manipulation of paint.