Alice’s descent down the rabbit hole came to mind as I stepped onto the basement stairs and a gold emblem caught my eye, like a promising flash of tail. Spray painted on the wall above me was the image of a grasshopper, the moniker of Gresham’s Ghost, the nomadic gallery that is hiding for the month on 25th Street.

The grasshopper appeared again, this time on the floor at the bottom of the steps, serving as the only indication I was heading in the right direction in an otherwise anonymous space, towards an exhibition titled “Cave Paintings.”

And after turning a corner, and walking along another hall, I finally came to a narrow room filled with people.  There was a guest book and beer by the door, and it would have looked like any other Chelsea opening if it weren’t for the slopping cement floors (steep enough to make women in heels move in slow, fearful, side steps to avoid falling) and the rugged walls, which had as many water pipes on them as paintings.

The show, curated by Bob Nickas, is the first of two installments of abstract paintings, most of which echo works discussed in a book by Nickas being published this month, Painting Abstraction. As the title of the show suggests, the space was suppose to evoke the feeling of being in a cave.  The setting definitely drew attention to itself, and the larger paintings were the most successful at competing with the environment. A David Ratcliff piece at the end of the narrow space (pictured above), sat like a visual lord, reining over all.  An  Anja Schwoerer painting of technicolor radiating beams also held its own. The smaller works, at the top of the incline, were perhaps too faint for the setting.  The most successful of the small ones had color schemes complimenting a nearby pipe, or electrical box, which helped to anchor them in the space.