Santa Monica

In Linda Kallan’s oil on masonite paintings geometric, hard-edge forms float in ambiguous space like the star-portal monolith in the movie “2010.” But Kallan’s vividly colored two-dimensional trapezoids, cubes and rectangles at times seem to be just a thin veneer of space themselves. Paintings like “Out of Nowhere,” with its central, many sided box, look as if the artist has somehow managed to peel back a filmy layer of the surrounding atmosphere and then fold it up like a piece of origami paper. The arresting diptych “It Was Bound to Happen” uses the geometric forms to punch through the solidness of the painted space like windows in a wall to reveal seemingly endless dimensions of more space beyond.

Kallan’s geometric forms occasionally suggest architectural settings that have solidified out of nothing. In “The Little Stick” a cantilevered wall appears mysteriously just to support a long red rod and prevent it from following its shadow down into an unseen abyss. But the architectural associations of the hard-edge forms can also summon up shadowy images of graveyards and crowded memorials, as they do in the dark and brooding burnt orange image of “Tomorrow” where tombstones seem to jostle one another for room in a tightly packed cemetery.

Kallan’s paintings amount to a painterly investigation into the ambiguities of pure geometry and space. Her paintings pit one against the other, gradually letting the solidity of the precise forms be absorbed by the overwhelming, shadowy vastness of indefinite space. (Merging One Gallery, 1547 6th St., to Oct. 15.)