Hollywood

Ken Hurbert’s debut solo is a series of abstract paintings where De Stijl geometries, machine-age icons and sweeping, frondlike gestures envelop and overlap each other like itinerant Modernist archetypes in a state of flux.

Hurbert leaves large sections of the canvas bare, letting this static foundation underline implied movement and illusory spatial depth.

While he shows considerable skill as a choreographer of seemingly incompatible forms, the artist’s dependence on an overworked, cliched vocabulary proves his undoing. His objective, as he puts it, is for “these forms of abstracted nature to move toward the unsayable, a point at which language cannot equal the form.”

Like many young artists striving for painterly transcendence, Hurbert is forced to resort to a strained reshuffling of the traditional Modernist deck. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Dec. 5.)