Santa Monica

Marching to a Dada drummer and carrying a Fluxus membership card, John M. Armleder arrived at his gallery two weeks before his show without a clue to what he would exhibit. Casting about for indigenous materials, he came up with two glistening wind foils used on trucks, three surfboards (to which he added pinstripes), a set of blue-gray Levelor blinds and a length of yellow vinyl. They are presently installed along with four stretched canvases painted with white horizontal stripes or wide black bands.

What’s interesting about this is not Armleder’s effrontery but the fact that the show looks so absolutely correct. It’s every bit as boring as any show of second-rate formalist abstraction until you grasp the concept: The Levelor and vinyl number tweaks pretensions of the chic “appropriationist” school, while the combinations of surfboards or truck gear with canvases merge pop culture with art for art’s sake--all in a spirit of irreverent questioning that can be taken for a stylish brand of irony.

Gerald Kamitaki also brings an unexpected twist to formalism, but it’s a matter of tension achieved through repetitive units that hold each other in place. If they were hung individually by nails driven through their off-center holes, these graphite-covered wood rectangles would swing to one side or the other. But tightly installed as a grid, they are elegant fields of charcoal gray evenly divided by the modules’ abutted edges. That might work well enough in itself, but Kamitaki complicates his work to good effect. In one piece he overlaps horizontal rows like shingles, forces another work into vertical zigzags and presses the center seam of another into a crease. (HoffmanBorman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., to Oct. 8.)