LA CIENEGA AREA

Wandering through empty old houses exercises a fascination usually ascribed to the pleasures of spookiness or nostalgia. An artist would probably say the fun of it is the unusual experience of space in houses uncluttered by conventional trappings. Karen Carson shows what that means in 17 new paintings and drawings.

Make no mistake; these are abstract paintings, Cubist paintings, but they suggest subject matter even more strongly than Richard Diebenkorn’s famously endless Ocean Park series. Technically, most of Carson’s compositions are diptychs, but they come across like standing in a doorway looking into two rooms at a time. One is small and windows are nearby, looking out on a flat horizon that pops up and, in a sense, blocks itself. The other room is a corridor that disappears in perspective. It doesn’t make sense with the first room because we don’t know the layout of the house. It’s like those calm, puzzling 17th-Century Dutch interiors.

Sprayed graffiti loops in a painting like “Between the Eyes” suggest that Carson got her inspiration wandering through abandoned L.A. bungalows. But there is more going on here. At first it is disappointing to realize the paintings are full of actual wood moldings for baseboards and picture frames. What we thought was terrific illusionistic painting is real 3-D material. After a minute it starts seeming a virtue itself. Carson is playing successfully with a lot of lines here, passing from painting to sculpture, abstraction to representation, formalism to expressionism.

One edge she does not mess with is that of the integrity of this art. Just the other day Carson was a newcomer in the second generation L.A. vanguard. All of a sudden she is a veteran who won’t budge an inch from making the best art she knows how. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to May 30.)