La Cienega Area

It’s a bit of a trek from the practical merchant burghers of the Netherlands to the ascetic home of Buddha, but abstract painter Lies Kraal makes the trip via acrylic on linen canvases that combine the traditional artistic humanism of her childhood Holland with the artist’s studies of Zen.

Collectively called “Metalscapes,” the paintings reproduce surfaces that look at first like conceptualist grids or orderings embossed on metal. One painting looks like a pewter slab with raised all-over square gridding. It turns out to be carefully surfaced acrylic worked to ape the luminescent alloy and hand-lined with fine, criss-cross ridges. Another work looks like chrome that’s been cast with horizontal striations. Again, the whole thing is a meditative feat of laying down dense pigment and manipulating its light-reflecting properties. Still another work achieves the surface effects of thin, crinkled silver foil reflecting some distant violet light source.

There’s a little of Ad Reinhardt’s impulse to create a unitary hypnotic image intended for contemplation here. What’s different and more humanistic is that Kraal intentionally lets the work of her hand show through so you have neither the icon, object nor ethereal qualities which so-called spiritual art usually strives for. The artist says Zen teaches the relatedness of all things. According to these pieces, Kraal locates the universal and precious in things as everyday as rusting copper (“Rust in Peace”) and scrap metal (“Manhole Abstract”). (Kiyo Higashi, 8332 Melrose Ave., to April 8.)