LA CIENEGA AREA

Mary Corse came to notice in the ‘70s, seemingly weaned on the old song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” She still pursues a purist mode in a baker’s dozen of large paintings made of glass microspheres. They are the stuff of those street signs and jogging-shoe heels that glow when your headlights hit them at night.

Corse has elevated the material to a poetic, if not religious, version of California Light and Space art. Obliquely approached, the paintings seem a uniform light gray. When you, the painting and the ceiling spotlight all line up correctly, compositions waft into a subtly glowing checkerboard of shimmering white that is slightly mottled like watered silk.

Compositions are so uniform in conception and similar in variation that it is a wonder they express anything at all or that the viewer is willing to hang around long enough to take it in. After all, from Malevich to Minimalism we have seen our share of ideological purity.

All the same, one particularly wide composition manages some optical bowing as we pace before it. (Oddly, the viewers need to move about before these unmistakably flat works gives them an aura of sculpture.)

Mainly Corse is an artist of rarefied sensibility. The pristine aristocracy of the work suggests a renaissance noblewoman who has taken to a convent where her devotional sense overlaps her aesthetic refinement. Clear hedonistic pleasure mixes with rigorous ethereality distilled into a modern version of Bernini’s “St. Theresa in Ecstasy.” (Flow Ace Gallery, 8373 Melrose Ave., to Oct. 31.)