La Cienega Area

That veteran Tony DeLap was wooed to Orange County from San Francisco back in the ‘60s is somehow fitting. His unusually handsome, rebellious brand of abstraction is right at home in Southern California where the winsome and the offbeat aren’t just welcome, they’re requisite. What is not Southern Californian about DeLap is that he is no faddist. For two decades and at the risk of looking dated, he has doggedly pursued an open-ended abstraction in shaped canvases, sculpture and drawings that take playful if elegant liberties with pure geometry. He displaces an angle here, shifts a plane or an arc there, undercutting the stability we expect from hard edges and setting up a kind of visual sleight of the hand probably influenced by DeLap’s favorite hobby: magic.

In current works DeLap’s trickery toys with now familiar distinctions between painting and object, between two dimensions and three. He completes the queer, shapely geometries of monochromatic canvases with richly finished, blond wood accents formed into arcs, wedges or overhead canopies whose bends, lines and shadows emphasize DeLap’s knack for both engaging shape and visual tomfoolery. In “Count Orloff,” DeLap cuts a deep wedge out of an ebony green circular canvas, then replaces the missing part with a pie shape of cool, smooth wood that folds out toward the viewer as if levitating. In the valentine canvas called “Incomprehendo,” DeLap is at his silly best; in the more staid “Devino” and “Mentalo,” he’s at his most refined.

Also shown are less interesting early watercolors from the “Card Fan” series, a small cast metal sculpture and “Floating Lady,” an edition of six collotype photos of revered monuments to which DeLap adds bits of perverse geometry like a bright shape crammed into the tympanum of a famous medieval church. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to May 13.)