Attesting to the raw power and harsh beauty of Steven Parrino’s best work, a sweeping show now on view at Gagosian’s uptown flagship more than lives up to the postmortem discussion of the artist’s studio practice, multifaceted collaborative activities, and tragic death at the age of 46 in early 2005. Even in its embrace of damage and failure, the work is poised, and completely self-assured. The current focus among abstract painters on the primacy of materials owes much to the work of this artist. Twenty years ago, at the height of theory-driven explanations of pictorial strategies, Parrino insisted that each of his paintings was “not a representation of something, but a concrete fact.” Despite the artist’s battery of references — to Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Lucio Fontana, Kasimir Malevich — the work is thoroughly Parrino’s own. He didn’t just take command of his influences; he put them in a headlock and wrestled them to the floor.