Marcus Jahmal’s paintings operate like a flexible, moving chessboard, composed of various color fields, on the ground of which a cast of characters play an eerie game, as in a dream. A woman’s leg protrudes into the picture; a cat hisses; a tuxedoed gentleman smokes a cigar in front of a giant, sleeping bat; angry hounds–a pack morphing into a Cerberus–snarl at the viewer; a musician offers his instrument to a still, half-nude dancer. These color fields–the stages so to speak–carry on the long history of non-representational painting, yet the figures’ anti-naturalism and feisty simultaneity extend that of expressionism. In…