Santa Monica

George Ketterl’s current show of paintings on wood and related drawings has the look of a chapel that focuses attention on a few objects of devotion. Sometimes shaped as cruciforms or the pointed windows associated with churches, his artworks aren’t about religion but spirituality as experienced through a quest for knowledge and self-awareness.

It has become a cliche to say that art communicates on several levels, but that’s exactly what’s going on here. The rough wood shapes, slathered in white, black or red oil have a rugged, sculptural power in themselves, vividly expressed at a distance. Up close, we find that Ketterl has drawn linear diagrams and outlines of a man into the wet pigment. He has also scratched out passages of text--a sort of stream-of-conscious poetry combining bits of nursery rhymes with dreamlike musings on a wizard’s search for “the temple of wisdom.”

These unobtrusive images and messages burrow into the pictures like hermetic truths. Wafting from the conscious to the unconscious and from the physical to the sublime, drawings and text are like traces of human effort and thought, etched into symbols of transcendence. Ketterl’s earlier gallery work was an outgrowth of endurance performances that pushed his body to its physical limits. The recent pieces seem more at peace with themselves as they track interior journeys. (Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., to July 16.)