Venice

Art either confronts us with entropy and vanitas, or--like the paintings of Santa Barbara’s Rick Stich--reassures us that there is still beauty and truth in spite of the spots on the rug and the six o’clock news.

For years, Stich has made loosely abstracted paintings from plein-air studies of shimmery koi, reflective ponds and idyllic gardens at Santa Barbara’s Alice Keck Park. He’s in the tradition of nature abstractionists from Monet to Dove to our own David Hockney whose pockets of color turned to light are formal cousins to these schematic, graceful ripples and plump fish. Besides koi, paintings show dense florals, water careening over smooth rocks, birds in flight. All are done with an ungainly roughness that’s needed in paintings that are almost too pretty for their own good. The huge three-paneled “Swim in the Light” carries us from the poppy yellow of sunset over water to the transparent blue-grays and squiggly shadows of dusk. Stich may paint the best of all possible worlds but always with an eye to the expressive and compositional potential of light, color and shape.

A rare, don’t-miss sampling of quality Indian miniatures is concurrently on view at the gallery’s Venice Boulevard space. Dated from the 16th-to-18th centuries when royal houses in India prized and cultivated tiny scenes of mythology and court life, the works are pristine jewels in the usual brilliant opaque pigments and fastidious detail of illumination. Show-stoppers include a prince caressing his favorite consort as dozens from his harem (each a minute individualized portrait) watch, serve, dance, converse. A gorgeous isolated portrait of a prince hints at the sort of stuff that took Manet and modernism by storm. Borrow the magnifying glass to really canvas one after another of these charming scenes. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St., 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Feb. 4.