WILSHIRE CENTER

Armando is a Dutch-born, Berlin-based painter and poet who first came to the fore in Amsterdam during the 1950s. A founding member of the Dutch Informal and Nul groups, Armando’s predominantly Abstract Expressionist canvases derive from a particularly pessimistic form of existentialism, where painterly process, the intuitive manipulation of materials and the “action” of the creative act are both cathartic and redemptive. In this respect, his spiritual mentors are clearly Pollock and the New York School.

Unlike them, however, Armando limits himself to a monochromatic palette and imbues his psychological “landscapes” with references to history (the ravages of World War II) and geography (the ominous forests that dominate the countryside surrounding Berlin). In his latest “Gefechtsfeld” or “Battlefield” series, he orchestrates the horizontal dialectic of black and white as a stormy “sea” of turbulent impasto, sandy surfaces and vibrant chiaroscuro.

The work’s strength lies in its tension between the heavy, often stodgy buildup of pigment and the rapid spontaneity of its execution. Its weakness is its historical context, its connection to an old-fashioned transcendental modernism that seems increasingly self-indulgent and egotistical in an age where conceptual distance and the debunking of false rhetoric is de rigueur . Whether such post-existential Angst manages to outlive the particularities of time and place, particularly the revisionism of post-modernist theory, remains to be seen. (Turske & Whitney Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to March 28.)