Santa Monica

Michael Young’s small, square paintings are sealed in resin, making the self-conscious nature of their geometries, textures and outside references all the more pronounced. Using sand and earth literally as a ground, Young manipulates flat, painted, solid-color crosses, bars, targets and small, bouncing circles so that they cast sly shadows, like real objects.

There are hints of lots of things in these tantalizingly aloof little works: the language of signs, TV screen patterns, ‘50s fabric design, astronomy, molecular diagrams, Native American sand painting, Malevich, Op art.

Amid the bright round shapes in “No Vacancy,” blue circles buried under sand seem as elusive as retinal after-images. In “Band Aid,” a translucent rectangle of sand hovers over a green target speckled with copper-colored circles laid out like coins on a railroad track.

A group of large drawings look surprisingly artless in comparison, with their whirling orbits of sand and earth. But these cosmological images also seem to be about finding the point at which texture begins, beginning with the faintest spill of grains of sand. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to April 9.)