La Cienega Area

David Reed is heir to Caravaggio and Pollock in impressive abstract paintings that are, on the one hand, dramatic, high pitched and as obsessively complex as the best Baroque works; on the other, tight and structure-conscious as the best works that revolutionized contemporary notions of pictorial space.

Reed made his way from San Diego to New York in 1971 and has built a national reputation as one of the few brush toters capable of keeping post modern painting from obsolescence.

He used to make two paneled works, the right side a single color field, the left, black and white brush strokes, each panel supposedly appealing to the differing functions of the brain, right and left. In apprehending the painting some integration was supposed to take place.

In current large-scale horizontal oil and alkyd paintings, Reed is still after unifying emotive thrust and conscious structure, but he handles the dichotomy with more subtlety.

Canvases are covered with continuous skeins of blood red, metallic blue or moss green strokes whose striations are dramatically shadowed in black, then highlighted in bright whites or yellows to give the handsome convolutions the look of iridescent whipped cream or kids’ finger painting seen in X-ray.

Reed first pulls us in viscerally by the hypnotic, gestural flow then deliberately stops short by overlaying Albers-like straight-edge divisions or constructivist boxes that force us to switch gears as we try to grasp the whole from its parts or vice versa. To say that art reconciles dualities is a cliche but these seamless, interesting works attract the observation. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to Jan. 7.)