Venice

A quartet of Ed Moses’s new untitled paintings from his “Tranc” series wraps the utmost finesse in throw-away ease. Each canvas zeroes in on a process of disintegration, an unraveling--as of ancient fabrics seen under a microscope. Grid-like weavings of broad gold, gray and Mandarin red “threads” come undone alongside loopy, dancing skeins.

They puddle, bubble and drip against vague, neutral grounds, sometimes emptying themselves out so thoroughly that the insides of the twisting forms disappear, leaving only ghostly outlines. As outgrowths of Moses’s long-term pursuit of a gentle paradox--a grid knitted together by the eccentricities of the gestural paint stroke--these paintings call to mind the knotty mastery attained by those Chinese brush painters the world still remembers centuries after they put their brushes down.

Also on view are recent sculptures by Peter Shelton. The most successful of these is “CBody,” a dull gray rounded copper oblong rising into a baleful spout. Hung low on the wall, the piece suggests the humble qualities of some aquatic dogsbody, scudding quietly along the ocean floor.

Burlap-imprinted cast iron sack forms suspended by wires from the ceiling are irregularly shaped, yielding grudgingly here and there to the invisible things that stuff them. But the gangling, crooked-necked “Bneck” and the garment-like pieces (“Open Sleeve” and “T”) have made several quite similar appearances in Shelton’s oeuvre. And the long, undulating, ceiling-suspended battered steel tubular pieces with multiple openings are not as magical as they seem cut out to be.

Landscape paintings of sites in three Western states by Richard Shaffer work best when they manage to be as abstract as possible without getting too vague. “Meta Physical Landscape (Half Moon Bay)” boils the view down neatly--if not too freshly--to dry horizontal swipes of whitened rose easing down into green. Working on paper, the Texas-based artist occasionally stirs up a lather of mountainside impasto or drags a nearly dry brush, but for the most part he seems content to set down his vision in thin and tidy long strokes of paint. The banality of most of his scenes is apparently without irony. Given that, he seems to put too much trust in the marriage of laboriously mingled colors and postcard vistas. (L.A. Louver, 55 Market St. and 77 Market St., Santa Monica, to June 24.)