La Cienega Area

Jack Goldstein left Los Angeles for New York years ago but his painting has always hinted at the kind of detached contemplation of light and perception typical of L.A. masters like Robert Irwin and James Turrell. That connection has never been clearer than in a current crop of seven untitled paintings. They initially look like fluxing blob-abstractions stabilized by flat circles or lozenge shapes telling us where the flat of the paint surface lies.

Closer examination shows they are carefully painted in wiggling stripes of graduated color that move from dark backgrounds to bright bursts of hue with definite--possibly masked--edges. The look is rather like computer-enhanced relief maps of the cosmos, romantic chaos rationalized by analysis. The effect is something else again.

Even veteran victims of Op-Art’s eye-stinging antics or Irwin’s magical manipulation of light and space have never seen anything quite like this. After a moment of close attention central color-blobs seem to literally click into other positions. They don’t fade, they click as if you were looking through the finder of a motor-drive camera. The paintings actually seem to move. Color halations turn on and off, backgrounds swirl jerkily like weather satellite photos on the TV news. It’s the damnedest thing.

These optical effects don’t happen if you just look; you have to stare a bit but it is worth it for visuals that are so rare in painting that their sheer perceptual wonder is all the justification they need. But you also get a spooky thematic suggestion. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that you are watching some malevolent revelation, a huge living X-ray of cancerous tissue, the earth viewed from another planet as it explodes in a hail of nuclear fireworks. (Asher/Faure Gallery 812 N. Almont Drive, to April 23).