There’s something about Shawn McNulty’s color fields that won’t let you relax completely. A bit of rough play with the palette knife, and an otherwise calm pool of paint becomes a choppy sea. By scraping, slicing and reapplying, McNulty avoids the zone-out of traditional abstract landscapes, offering instead a more battered and complex meditation. A small retrospective in the basement of Rosalux Gallery — the art space McNulty helped found, back in 2002 — gives us a sense of how he arrived at this point. The eight-year scope of work includes some cool ideas that McNulty flirted with but never developed, such as stretching canvases behind window panes and collaging text with pop art imagery. – Gregory J. Scott