Santa Monica

Icelandic native Vignir Johannsson is known in Santa Fe for lusty Neo-Expressionist nudes nourished by a Nordic vitality. A year ago he began doing large scale abstract sculpture--a lumbering sci-fi mound of granite on tiptoeing bronze feet or careening sea waves fusing with all manner of materials.

An L.A. show shifts to strictly abstract work that replace the figure with a repeating accordion shape painted in oil on canvas, monotyped or tooled in bronze or copper. Whether painted or actual, the folded form can look like an origami pattern bending benignly in and out of space or some spiky, treacherous tool from a past or future Iron Age.

In the paintings the form is added to blade shapes that rupture drippy, quickly worked atmospheres marbled with gray, ochre or rust. The effect is exuberant and menacing, a little like an iceberg piercing the air in the middle of a nasty polar storm. In the copper sculpture “Reaching Out,” the folded form is hemmed in by long lateral wings that span nearly 17 feet.

Connecting with viewers via some exposed raw nerve will always be a strategy in art, and that’s clearly what Johannsson is after in these energetic works. Unfortunately, some of them don’t do much more than massage the eyeballs. (Natoli-Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, to Dec. 17.)