Flying off the edges of the expected

These works are no doubt every bit as carefully plotted as the striped and patterned paintings. We get a glimpse into her process with several smaller sketches in pastel. There’s a “Young Galaxy’’ pastel here, and the resulting “Young Galaxy’’ oil. The pastel could be a preschooler’s refrigerator art, ecstatically messy, with drooping fronds of royal blue, green, purple, and red over meandering scribbles in yellow and pink. There’s a surrealist quality of automatic drawing, and it’s loaded with the brawny gestures of abstract expressionism.

In the “Young Galaxy’’ painting, everything snaps into place. The overflowing form remains, but here the droops are galvanized by crisp double lines careening around the canvas. There’s not nearly as much blue, yet there are many shades of it, from powder to navy. The swooping, snarling lines reach toward the edge of the canvas, but don’t quite touch it, and make a barely contained storm. In between them, Riley fills spaces with colors, yummy as a free-for-all at a sorbet stand.

The lines fly off the edges of “Fire-Fangled Feathers,’’ the largest piece at 90 inches by 66 inches. This format allows Riley to play with space. The double lines cross under and over, inevitably suggesting room to tangle. But when she fills in many of the interstices with flat, albeit luscious colors - plum, tangerine, magenta - the space collapses. That tension, plus the sheer audacity of gesture and the breathless movement it engenders, makes for exuberant paintings.

Density and delicacy