Venice

After a quarter century, L.A. stalwart Tony Berlant has hit full stride. An impressive two-gallery show of some 25 works finds him tinkering away as usual making huge pictures and little houses out of flattened bits of painted metal nailed on as if by some tin-woodsman quilter.

In the old days Berlant’s visual enthusiasm used to run away with work, garbling it into meaningless perfumed patterns. That still happens occasionally, but now the output is dominated by gorgeously harmonized color and freed space frank in its hedonism and affection for the laid-back life of our sunny, tacky beach towns.

Not that the work is provincial. Berlant uses space in cosmopolitan accents that suggest the Anglo-American expatriate Ron Kitaj. It’s a kind of opened-up Cubism where objects float, giggling to the surface and then drift away like the surf. Works exist on the border between abstraction and reality as if produced by a bemused poet who recalls memories more than literal events.

“The Taxco Cafe” is as cheery as a Dufy and 10 times tougher. Those pretty squiggles are the names of Berlant’s artists friends quilted in shorthand. The picture seems to say, “Remember that afternoon we took three hours for lunch? Remember that girl in the red dress and floppy hat? Actually I don’t remember the girl, but that was some outfit.” So there stands the red dress and the hat with no girl inside.

Everything’s turning into something else. In “Windward,” the Venice loggia is about to become the setting of an early Italian Renaissance annunciation. Pretty good for the whacked-out mysticism of the beach.

“Sunrise at Sunset Beach” turns daybreak into a splendid display of spark plugs and metal flake. In “Zygote,” the sky buzzes with a monster helicopter and a jellyfish floating over a building that also aspires to fly.

The big gallery contains large-scale masterworks like “Inside Out.” The small one seems crowded and confuses our ability to tell when Berlant is at his best. At least we are reminded of a near-Japanese refinement capable of turning enameled tin into a stylized haze of sun-bleached atmosphere. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 72 Market St. and 55 N. Venice Blvd., to May 21.)