LA CIENEGA AREA

Worried about making “a costly mistake,” as the decorators say, when you buy a painting? Concerned about choosing colors that harmonize smoothly? And what if you get tired of the composition?

Tim Ebner has just the thing for you. His gridded abstractions are not only color-cued according to decorators’ paint samples, they are composed of 16 squares that can be interchanged and attached with Velcro. And in case you want to store them for a while, they fit neatly into custom-made plywood boxes.

Done in pleasing pastels (two different tints of one hue and another contrasting one), each painting has four panels of undulating brush strokes (applied to canvas as monoprints) and 12 of solid-color semigloss. As presented in the gallery, the arrangement of panels is different in each painting, progressing methodically with the movement of one brushy panel.

It’s easy to see this slick-looking art as the ultimate in cynicism or as a sell-out to decorators’ mentality. Fortunately, there’s another side to be considered: a persistent, legitimate interest in art’s affiliation with mathematics or “systems.” Working out a strict procedure for making art--and deriving poetry from it--has been done by no less an artist than Sol LeWitt. The key, of course, is to devise a system that has some breathing space in it. Ebner’s human touch is in the brush work, which contrasts sharply with the perfect, solid-color surfaces but still retains a mechanical quality. In short, this work qualifies as a clinical form of conceptual art, far more interesting to think about than to look at. (Kuhlenschmidt-Simon, 9000 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 3.)