LA CIENEGA AREA

All beginning art students are required to paint color and value charts. These are rows of hues or grays that are progressively lightened, darkened and juxtaposed until the whole prismatic range has been captured like some homey checkerboard rainbow. Even though this is a mechanical exercise it always turns up a fascinating symphonic range of visual effects.

Historically it might be said that color Minimalists like Josef Albers fashioned careers out of making a creative codification of these color chart effects. Well, local painter James Hayward persists in this tradition under trying circumstances. In these Post-Modern days the ideological rigors of militant Minimalism seem prissy rather than heroic and people want their art stylish rather than puritanical.

It may be that Hayward is trying to come to grips with all that. His 16 one-color canvases (often arranged in diptychs and triptychs) are rendered in pigment as thick as Spanish stucco. This could be a move to placate Neo-Expressionism. He often picks color combinations that are selling like waffles in Melrose boutiques. Flesh pink and black are especially hot.

Be that as it may, these paintings are not sell-outs even if they compromise a bit. Hayward makes pink-and-black earn its living broadcasting and absorbing light. He uses impasto to suggest effects of nature in one triptych and to created lovely iridescence in a blue slab. Anybody who has spent a lifetime looking at modern art is permitted to find it all a bit preachy and rudimentary but you have to like Hayward for hanging on. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Feb. 10.)