WILSHIRE CENTER

A telltale buzz and eerie light let you know you’re in the company of neon as you enter Stephen Antonakos’ show, but he demonstrates the sensibility of a painter. The main attractions are unstretched, acrylic-painted or -stained canvases that are pierced by rings and lines of glowing neon. Except for a glossy white square of painted wood with a pink halo behind it, these wall pieces read as landscapes.

A sweep of red rushes up to meet a turbulent, deep blue sky in one work, while brushy blue-greens suggest water and skies in others. All are accented by a few well-placed circles, squiggles or straight lines of neon. This is an arbitrary combination of media, but Antonakos makes it work by fusing soft auras of colored light with evocative abstract painting. If you doubt that Antonakos is as interested in beauty as in technology, check out his half-dozen drawings. Their feathered surfaces of solid red or black colored pencil on plastivellum are so sensuous that you scarcely notice the pristine compulsion that guides them.

Concurrently, a show of prints published by Peter Blum is dominated by Brice Marden’s suite of 25 “Etchings to Rexroth.” Non-representational, linear configurations, they run from simple-looking enclosures, free-floating on white pages, to geometric constructions that fill rectangular spaces with tensely wrought balance. Those who know Marden only as a purist painter of striped or solid canvases will see another side of the artist here: one who delights in working with a full vocabulary of line--dripped, scratched, wiry and succulent. (Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 14.)