Santa Monica

You’ve got to respect a gallery with an untrendy commitment to reductive abstract work. In this spirit, Angles Gallery features the work of Lienhard von Monkiewitsch. Billed as stark geometry, the pieces have a surprisingly lush, tactile lure. On the wall are mounted half-foot-deep hunks of wood cut in asymmetrical hard-edge forms and painted a rich, lustrous black that seems to penetrate their depth. Also shown are impressive large drawings that turn dated concerns about literal versus illusionistic surfaces into witty, technical coups.

Using the internally channeled brown surface of corrugated cardboard as his material, Von Monkiewitsch first peels back selective areas of the cardboard’s thin outer sheathing. Then using a razor, he establishes another plane of depth by cutting into the cardboard, exposing bits of the bee hive compartments inside. Over this he paints taut black shapes that “float” perceptually, one moment hovering in front of compositions, the next looking as if they’re embedded somewhere in each work’s paradoxical space. (Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., to Nov. 19.)