Venice

Treating paper like a soft sponge and pencil grid lines like a call to order, Ed Moses’ newest gouache paintings are intriguing bits of happenstance and control. Rice paper flecked with pieces of bark make a light, absorbent ground that gives dark paint an earthy aura sparked by occasional bursts of flourescent pink.

The poetry of these paintings is in the small puddles, leaks and color separations that happen as paper repeatedly absorbs calligraphic touches of paint. Yet the potency of the image doesn’t come entirely from the uncontollable chance events. Rather they work because the softness of the liquid decomposes the underlying grid structure in an fluid, organic mass. It’s a particularly Zen system of checks and balances that allows paint to suggest a fertile humus without turning the system into sodden mud.

Also on view are Tony Berlant’s newest found metal collage panels. Increasingly busy, his shiny, color rich surfaces still mix figuration and abstraction in lush landscapes that occasionally lose themselves in their own complexity of line and form.

Something excitingly different is going on in “The Last Moment,” a wild, two-panel, bull’s eye of circles and stripes pieced together with metal sign fragments bearing photo imagery. Like a huge, late night TV test pattern splattered with pieces of recognizable fruits and animals from defunct shows, the piece bulges into three dimensions as a seed pod pops into real space. More than the allusion to deep space or archaeological time that comes from the other collages, this piece seems to want to talk in everyday language about what is and isn’t real. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St. and 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Sept. 16.)