Wilshire Center

Penelope Krebs sets down vivid vertical tracks of color in square, symmetrical compositions. Black and pollen-yellow stripes alternate in one; in another, the reddest red stripe is surrounded by an honor guard of stinging yellow and acid green.

The colors seem prototypically Southern Californian and yet convey purely abstract information. Intensity of hue is achieved through multiple layerings of oil paint, which always retains an impersonal light-soaking surface. Color and form are idealized into a single bright, powerful presence.

Still in his 20s, Los Angeles painter Perry Araeipour has hit on a way of manipulating close values to create delicate tension within square, seemingly monochromatic canvases. In “LA-19,” the eye shuttles between L-shaped segments of deep blue and black. A central square area serves as a harmonic resolution of the optical dilemma.

Elsewhere, Araeipour almost invisibly slices his canvases into other blackened geometrical arrangements. The meditative quality that attends these pieces is all the more intense because it results from a subtle contest of opposing forces. (Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., to July 30.)