SANTA MONICA

George Ketterl’s painting has an intensity that overtakes its hermetic aspect. Even if you can’t immediately pinpoint the art’s significance and hug its big black panels to your chest, you recognize the energy that’s at work. In that regard, the oil-on-wood paintings currently exhibited grow directly from Ketterl’s performances that pushed physical exertion to a transcendental state.

Such words as limits, exhaustion and time --scratched through solid layers of pigment to expose a contrasting undercoat--appear on the panels, suggesting heroic feats, self-inflicted tests and the temporal nature of life. These words emerge along with outlined figures, concentric circles, directional lines and stream-of-consciousness poetry. The text, which fades in and out of view in the paintings, is reproduced in a paper booklet for those who want to read it.

Literal-minded viewers may be disappointed that the graffito images don’t illustrate the text, but Ketterl’s visual-verbal pairing is far more interesting than that. Phrases seem quite magically strung together as they spill out visions of a wizard “on the edge of the dream” or of “high flying at the perfect horizon of the soul.” Another work asks, “What do people experience when they are in a coma?” Collectively, the text is a poetic counterpoint to severe-looking paintings that seem obsessed with a heightened awareness of both physical and mental states.

Constructed of overlapping, mismatched panels that often allude to crosses and figures, and scratched in nervous, highly charged line, Ketterl’s paintings provide a striking example of physical energy transformed into art that hangs on the wall. (Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., to Feb. 28.)