If selling art relies on telling the artist’s mythos, this gallery has struck gold with the estate of the seabed crawler Maniatakos. The man was an acclaimed artisan and amateur sculptor of marble extracted from his home island of Tinos. That alone could earn him a footnote in art history and be enough to turn his archive of “sculptures, photography, and a boat” into an art fair presentation. 

But, bingo, Maniatakos was also a marketable eccentric who spent his summers diving to the ocean floor with a breathing apparatus and waterproof canvas, both of his own invention. These trips gave rise to a murky, textured chronicle of paintings that bear more resemblance to Etel Adnan landscapes than the sun-kissed idyll postcard a tourist may associate with the Greek island coast. 

These pictures are not abstracts, but their surfaces recorded waves alongside the artist’s vantage. One renders the other only half-legible. Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery, either. The gallery’s press release, however, follows the tide blindly.