LA CIENEGA AREA

John McLaughlin’s austere abstractions have acquired a soothing quality over time. In the days of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, the late artist’s spare divisions of rectangles into hard-edge spaces struck many viewers as dry, mechanical and arbitrarily abrupt. But now that the extreme cold of Minimalism and the heat of Neo-Expressionism have been absorbed, McLaughlin’s work appears to have warmed and exposed its human aspect. The edges are tremulous, the surfaces softly rippled, the palette generally neutral or muted. To enter a gallery filled with his paintings from the ‘50s is to be gratified by the sight of a calm intelligence at work and to be reassured that his place in Los Angeles’ art history has not been overstated.

All 10 of the oils currently exhibited are simply divided into stripes or rectangles, but they follow no formula--except, perhaps, in their effect. While they often appear to be evenly split down the middle and, say, subdivided in thirds, they are nearly always asymmetrical studies in visual balance. A single red band or a chunk of chartreuse may carry much more expansive areas of black and white. While one canvas with a black stripe severing an intense span of yellow and another with horizontal bands floating on a white background actually are symmetrical, other canvases are unpredictably “off.”

Just when you think that you too could turn out a McLaughlin, you see that a checkerboard effect is subtly broken by a corner meeting of two blocks of white and that the bands along the top and bottom of another painting are the product of conditioned intuition. It’s his ability to deal with the weights and measures of painting--to structure a geometric abstraction according to personal logic--that gives McLaughlin’s work its staying power. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Aug. 1.)