Wilshire Center

Nelson Valentine paints big monochromatic (muddy orange or dark blue) images of volcanoes, geysers, water spouts, hurricanes and cloud formations that look somewhat like hazy enlarged photographs. Subtle shiny-textured geometric patterns dance over these canvases, virtually disappearing on the lower portions of the paintings, away from the full blast of the gallery lighting.

In these works the young Los Angeles artist contrasts raging (or at least unpredictable) nature with the formal orderliness of the nearly subliminal patterns. In four “Untitled (Atmosphere)” pieces, for example, Valentine throws a glistening checkerboard or orderly ranks of circles, ovals or squares over a milky roiling form barely emerging from a field of midnight blue.

An engagement with natural phenomena rooted in 19th-Century Romantic painting fuses here with the notion of viewing such fleeting and forceful forms of nature through the distancing medium of a monumental, fixed and arbitrarily colored image. The deliberate intrusiveness of the unrelated patterns pushes direct apprehension of nature to an even further remove while substituting the immediacy of a perceptual device. Instead of being moved and startled by a natural event, the eye is mildly distracted by surface events completely controlled by the artist.

Occasionally, however, the patterns do seem clearly related to the image. In “Untitled (Geyser)”--a misty white veil shooting up past the prickly edged silhouettes of trees and diagrammatic black waves below--the optical patterns are stylized wave forms that expand as they rise upward, mimicking (in a measured, rigorous way like a physics textbook illustration) the expansive upward push of the geyser itself.

An artist called Blue McRight simultaneously shows thickly textured 14-inch-square square paintings of small events erupting in harshly lit space, part of the young L.A. newcomer’s “Artificial Light” series.

A green-blue light surrounds a dog tense with the scent of danger against a crudely furrowed stucco wall (“Messenger”). A shopping cart blazes next to an orange building chewed by a textured dark-blue sky (“Shopping Cart on Fire”). But some of the best images avoid obvious sources of drama. In “People in the Park,” an orange-haloed street light whitewashes an anonymous crowd of people and flicks bits of orange illumination on the textured greenness of the trees. And in “Traffic,” McRight bulks together thickly ridged cars whose airless, congested state is abetted by a leaning building pockmarked with windows and hazy distant buildings simmering under smog. (Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to July 2.)