Santa Monica

In the past, Martin Facey has painted dreamy canvases where symbols float in spaces punctuated by illusionistic passages. If those paintings seemed to roam over lots of visual and philosophical terrain, recent works stay obsessively close to one theme, the vase. Probably choosing vessels for their spiritual connotations and art historical meanings, Facey calls the series “Vessels of Light.”

All the paintings begin with a rich expanse of layered color, homogenized into a pastel field. That is where the simplicity ends. Placed in these taut fields are various forms of the tear drop, which represent incarnations of a vase. The logical frontispiece for the show, “Vessels of Light 1: Fine Vessel of a Blue-Prowed Fleet” shows the vase almost intact, missing one small fragment and hovering over an ethereal-looking sphere. Like all of the vases, this one is encircled by long bright filaments of color that work themselves into a knotted frenzy of carnival ribbons at the very top quadrant of each work.

From one large canvas to the next, the vase shape and symbol metamorphoses into spreading wings or conspicuously modernist half-spheres of color. Facey adds small triangles and atmospheric pockets that look almost like a window of landscape passing from the shallow picture surface back into some other mysterious space.

Titles such as “Vessel Of Light: Down the Mead of Asphodel” suggest that Facey’s allusive menu is complex, and not always clear. At a quick glance, the paintings even call up early Roman illusionistic painting unearthed at Pompeii. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to July 2.)