Santa Monica

Shades of Robert Mangold and the Constructivists hover over the paintings of Illinois-based artist Rodney Carswell, and yet his approach is studiously--and successfully--his own. Carswell’s canvases (sometimes several are joined together to form one work) project from the wall on wooden scaffoldings, casting object-like shadows and engaging in stubborn spatial arguments with the geometrical images painted on their surfaces.

Thin, hard-edged white lines delineate an upright cross that contradicts its support, a greenish-white askew X. A tilting white cross stretches painfully across four red squares misaligned into an unstable almost-square format.

The surfaces of the paintings offer a further series of gentle contradictions. Imperfections in the canvas and the layered applications of paint and wax create a slubbed surface (more distinctively fabric-like than the bare canvas) and introduce fragments of other colors. Seemingly hard-edged geometric figures have softened edges. Minimalist rigor succumbs to the vagaries of the artist’s hand.

In one piece, “Two Grays and Orange Around an Empty Rectangle,” Carswell flirts with more eccentric colors and pushy pattern--a regular striping of orange, forest green and greenish-white--on a frame-like canvas that immediately suggests a deconstructivist treatment of the “art object.” Despite the vulnerable streaks of errant color, the waxy surface of the painting seems deliberately to hold the viewer at arm’s length. The resulting tension is a sweet intellectual tease. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to March 2.)