Review: Lisa Williamson’s shrewd ‘body boards’ are unsettling blasts of color

Abstract painting, especially in its stripped-down Minimalist mode, has frequently exploited a bodily metaphor of skin and bones as a motif — canvas as a skin stretched over the bones of a structural support. In a shrewd and surprising new show of recent abstractions, Lisa Williamson drops the bones and goes all skin.

The five large paintings at the gallery Tif Sigfrids are executed on thin sheets of powder-coated aluminum, each 6½ feet tall and installed to stand away from the wall about a half-inch. Powder-coating, a polymer resin system whose commercial introduction dates to the Minimalist 1960s, fuses solid color to metal.

Williamson’s paintings look like thin, suspended slices of pure blue, black, white and gold hue.

“Tsunami” curls out and away from the wall at the top like a wave. (It recalls Craig Kauffman’s transparent acrylic reliefs from the ’60s.) “Stereo” features two shallow, concave black bowls affixed to a white slab, suggesting a speaker system. “Sunbather” is edged in pink and broadly fringed at the bottom, while the greenish-black field of “Nerves” is pocked with 10 little circular step-pyramids in crimson.

“Tincture,” the most complicated of the five, has side wings folded out and away from the wall. Williamson subtly underscores the suggestion of a religious triptych by its golden hue.

Its bright bands of yellow and white are just thick enough to feel as much like solid skins of color as the powder-coated panel around which they wrap. The linear design — skin on skin — is like an unraveled Josef Albers painting of white-line color shapes, emphasizing the work’s sensual, secular faith.

Williamson’s cheery thin-skin paintings, which she calls “body boards,” are oddly unsettling. Strange bodies composed of irrational color deployed with extreme rationality, they do just fine without any skeletal bones.

Tif Sigfrids, 1507 Wilcox Ave., Hollywood. Through Dec. 3; closed Sundays and Mondays. (323) 907-9200, www.tifsigfrids.com

christopher.knight@latimes.com

Twitter: @KnightLAT

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