Santa Monica

Joan Thorne paints large, bright, three-dimensional shapes sinking in a sea of squiggly lines. The shapes are powerful, abstract forms whose mass toys with weight amid a feathery web of floating lines. As the wispy brush strokes sweep around the shapes they create rivulets of motion that tickle form and void alike with a charged, furry atmosphere. Thorne’s expressionistic energetic lines and the more hard-edged static forms make an unlikely wedding of inertia and movement. But the resulting image, with it’s ominous depths thickened by pulpy fibers, is solid.

Thomas Schulte believes in order. His altarlike sculptures look like medieval relics of an age convinced that science could chart all the workings of the universe. Small, dark and brooding, they use assemblage to isolate and venerate the mathematical order found in beehives, the human body, architecture and astrology. Most pieces are inscribed with various spheres, sextants, rulers, Celtic interlocking designs and strange merging pyramids. Mixing tools of reason and metaphysics results in constructions rich in mystery that also function as strange archaic articles of faith. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., To June 30).