Review: Hayal Pozanti’s paintings will leave you wanting more

Hayal Pozanti’s five new paintings at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects resemble the impossible offspring of doodles and diagrammatic drawings of machine parts.

The combination is felicitous. It links the no-nonsense functionalism of precisely designed prototypes to the whimsy of what people used to do with ballpoint pens and scraps of paper when we had time to kill. Art, Pozanti’s mid-size acrylics on panel suggest, satisfies desires we didn’t know we had until they are revealed to us by the works themselves.

There’s a meat-and-potatoes pragmatism to Pozanti’s paintings, a hearty solidity to the flat expanses of their industrial colors and the rudimentary illusionism of their hand-drawn forms. Some parts lock together loosely, like pieces from mixed-up jigsaw puzzles. Others abut snugly, like smoothly machined pistons or meticulously engineered circuitry.

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A love of geeky details is also evident in Pozanti’s compositions. It comes through in the gooey thickness of her brushstrokes, in the spunky roughness of their contours and, most emphatically, in the skinny slices of bright colors that peek out from behind some shapes.

As a painter, Pozanti handles imperfection with the best of them. Knowing when enough is enough, and when it’s too much, the Istanbul-born, Yale-educated, New York-based artist leaves you wanting more of just what she’s up to.

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Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., (310) 837-2117, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com