First things come second at Newton’s New Art Center.

Two lives of different length take a turn at mid-career. One from philosophy, the other from medicine, both with the equally large ambition of documenting the other side of the brain, the insistent one not sanctioned by the academy or the workplace.

I’m looking at “Triangulation” by Irwin E. Thompson, M.D. It’s a rich impasto of blues, oranges and greens, a fruit salad of oils, so juicy they belie the dry measurement implied by the title and process of triangulation. And they’ll never locate a point by meeting physically, since they all swim at such different depths of the picture plane; the hot colors push forward, the cool ones recede.

Adding to this complication, the triangles pictured, though insistently pointing forward, seem to be disintegrating in mid-motion, hues of their underclothes showing through their sleek, shiny surfaces. Or are they simply reformulating their purposes by a reconfiguration that only appears to be a disintegration?

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