Wassef Boutros-Ghali trained as an architect and has worked as an architect. But his love of painting eventually won out. In his art, he says, he has “transformed reality by simplifying it … abolishing a subject and having only forms.” Boutros-Ghali’s careful handling of composition and geometry gives his abstract work a je ne sais quoi. It is reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s paintings, Patrick Henry Bruce’s Purism, and the Precisionist paintings of Manierre Dawson. Ineffably precise, with rectilinear shapes and compass curves held in exquisite balance, these paintings express emotion through color. The searching eye will detect here the sail of a boat, there a Cypress tree. —E.C.