LA CIENEGA AREA

You’ll hardly recognize the old boy. Willem de Kooning is 82 and has been the last of the Grand Masters of Abstract Expressionism for as long as most adults can recall. His work is rarely seen on the West Coast, so any glimpse is a treat and and event. The present one is additionally a flabbergastment.

At an age and station when most artists are content to do feeble imitations of their former selves, De Kooning has taken off on such a new tack that the uninformed viewer could easily fail to recognize the maestro.

Oh, the dozen untitled works done since 1982 remain large and abstract, but where they were once blowsy, robust and earthy they have grown lean, wry and cosmopolitan. Gone are the great slathers of thick paint. Gone the smashing strokes as wide as house painters’ brushes. Gone the feathered transparencies of De Kooning yellow, De Kooning blue and De Kooning flesh.

Well, almost.

He has taken to composing with thin ribbons of color that break the canvas into a surface of jigsaw shapes. At first they look like big painted drawings--colored line on blank paper. They are as relaxed and lyrical as Matisse or Picasso at leisure on the Cote d’Azur--maybe a tad arrogant in their self-assurance. What is this, some dotty fooling, some second-kidhood kidding?

Not on your tintype.

According to the brushwork, all those white shapes have been individually painted to contribute to the real leitmotif of the show, a relaxed and wise rumination on various kinds of space. A couple re-create the cascading compositions of De Kooning’s old roommate, Arshile Gorky. A couple of others distill the cosmic galaxies of Kandinsky without in any sense being mere visual puns or studio variations. De Kooning’s own sense of landscape visits itself on all the pictures, giving them a feeling of path, tuck and personage that is like a flattened zoom-lens walk on a beach that is at the same time a forest.

Oddly enough, De Kooning comes closest to blowing it when he tries for the complications of himself in former incarnations. A set of fat tapeworm blue strokes gets away from him, and another with a small passage of painting-in-drawing meanders off as if he lost his place. De Kooning is stuck with his new role as a European-style maker of twinkly eyed profundities. He could do a lot worse. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to Feb. 21.)