Santa Monica

Literal-minded viewers may see helmets, horns, architectural ornaments or golf balls and tees in Cliff Benjamin’s paintings, but the identity of the objects is largely beside the point. Formerly identified with talismanic images, the young Los Angeles artist now deals with the problem of what to paint by selecting or inventing objects that suggest vague associations but can’t be positively named. That leaves him free to do what he knows best: move warm-toned pigment around so that images float, emerge, hover, spin or disintegrate. Rather like Terry Winters, Benjamin often scatters reincarnations of the same image across a field. Also like Winters, he doesn’t always offer pictorial unity but provides juicy passages of painterly delight. Then again, Benjamin may center the familiar objects in an emblematic way, or work up a surprising head of steam in a spiraling snakelike form. There’s considerable virtuosity on display here, and nearly as much indecision about what to do with it.

Concurrently, eight hard-edge, solid-color lithographs and screenprints, produced by Ellsworth Kelly at Gemini in the early ‘70s, are graphic mementos of the artist’s trademark coupling of color and shape. (Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., to Saturday.)