Wilshire Center

Photographer Richard Misrach finds a delicate abstract beauty in the Salton Sea, a flooded ancient lake near Palm Springs. His “Desert Seas” series of the mid-’80s is part of an ongoing group of desert “cantos,” songs to a strangely visionary land. He’s an heir of the Luminists--those 19th-Century painters of utterly calm, glassy-surfaced seas.

Sun and atmospheric conditions variously tint Misrach’s lake water a wrapping-paper brown, wispy blue, pearly gray, faint yellow. In “Salton Sea Overview, Pink” too-lovely-to-be-true horizontal bands of pink and blue are punctuated only by fly-speck birds and tiny buoys. In another view, a lamppost is one of a group of semisubmerged objects that read like idiosyncratic drawings strung across gray-white space.

Occasionally, as in “Pyramid Lake No. 3” (the meeting place of a dark, loamy spit and a light sandy cliff elsewhere in the desert), Misrach’s stress on reductive form and perfect equilibrium becomes too predictable. Other photographs move in closer to the objects in Salton Sea (ramshackle buildings, mud-caked tires), granting them a double existence as shapes seen by an artist’s eye and odd remnants of past attempts to colonize nature. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to July 9.)