La Cienega Area

A writer and theoretician, Dan Flavin is one of the granddads of conceptual art and reductionist ideas. He has separated color from pigment, using intangible colored light as a way to compose and play with the space that holds his works.

This is obvious in a piece made from a 6-by-6-foot grid of fluorescent tubes in zany neon colors. Abutting a corner, the grid and its armature are cleanly crafted geometric art. Beyond that, the piece interacts with the corner of the gallery to create a triangle of empty colored space. Light from the grided fluorescents bleeds and blends on surrounding surfaces to make amorphous geometries with unfixed barriers. These exaggerate, flatten or just call attention to the geometry of the show space.

New Yorker Matthew Weinstein debuts in Los Angeles with large abstractions of pneumatic, turgid spheres painted in fiery, glossy colors and enlarged to look like they’re viewed at very close range. These globes of color all but take up the dark, smoldering space that Weinstein suspends them in. In “Do Unto Others I,” a green podlike mass seems lit from a brilliant external light that gradually transforms its rounded planes from greens to sensual wet oranges and yellows. A thin filament links this sphere to a second equally fiery ball and the whole thing floats in a nocturnal field.

In other works, Weinstein plays with and enlarges scale even further so that we only see fragments of spheres in the form of large volumetric arcs entering the picture plane from a corner to crowd other rounded masses of hue. Weinstein gives the paintings an Old Master surface sheen and straight-from-the-tube color intensity for a high-energy effect that calls up pulsating organs, careening atoms compressed in a minute area or planets reeling in infinity. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Flavin at 619 N. Almont Drive, to Oct. 21.; Weinstein at 625 Almont Drive, to Sept. 30.)