Wilshire Center

“Dark as a Space” introduces three young artists who play with ideas of depth and surface in various ways. Lynne Baxter clots sharply demarcated portions of steel mesh rectangles with a goopy mixture of wax and black paint. Fandra Chang stretches filmy fabric printed with wood-grain designs over lengths of wood. And Laura Cooper coats flat, curving aluminum shapes with thin skins of paint.

The mesh in Baxter’s wall-hung pieces offers a built-in minimalist grid that undergoes a sea change when the black goop messes with its airy precision. The grid seems to slow down and stumble, as it were, what with clots of paint thickening or obliterating some of the lines and a dense, hunkering darkness taking the place of the lightness of wire bounded solely by air. In one of her untitled works, the mesh between the two squares of black is allowed to droop in a sagging accordion fold--as if in illustration of two kinds of “heaviness,” one created by gravity and the other by the absence of air.

Chang is a recent graduate of CalArts, and her work reflects the self-consciously analytical posture for which the school has become known. The painted wood texture on the filmy green, red or purple fabric mockingly makes the real wood grain redundant, and some of the areas of uncovered wood are gouged and inked in decorative ways, as if to beat nature at its own game.

Cooper’s ultra-flat pieces are the warmest and most seemingly traditional of the group. “Angel” is a fat, notched semi-circle of aluminum thinly painted black and gold over a red ground. Brush strokes follow the shape of the curve with the fidelity of record grooves, interrupted here and there with irregular, scuffed markings. In “Skirt,” a vertical arc of flat aluminum with sharply pointed corners takes on a drift of red and yellow paint. It isn’t quite clear what motivates this work. An accompanying essay by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe suggests that format and content are not necessarily related in this piece, but the “content” is awfully elusive. (Marc Richards Gallery, 4847 W. Jefferson Blvd., to July 29.)