Santa Monica

East Coast painter Gregory Amenoff debuts in Los Angeles with a dozen or so powerfully manic abstract paintings. Canvases brim with lumbering pneumonic shapes that insinuate landscape--a forest, a webbed freeway overpass--or evoke the vague amoebas of biomorphic abstraction painted with a heavier and more somber hand. Tightly hued in umbers, heavily accented with black and only remotely representational, the works have a raw, unpremeditated flavor. Like the marks of Expressionist woodcuts, the paint strokes in these medium- to large-scale works constitute a good portion of the story line.

In “Hippocrene,” a huge V-shaped “twig” appears to sprout tiny snail antennae; behind it ripple lateral brush strokes tooled to look like bleached, knotted wood or careening water. In “Urania,” geometric wedges of grayed blue radiate from the upper right hand and, like glass shards or brittle rays, extend to pierce the foreground. We never read “sun” or “bud” or “star” per se in this work because Amenoff is smart enough to avoid banality through literalness. What we get is the feel of energy that begins from a central core and explodes. (Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to April 9.)