La Cienega Area

In his first L.A. show, New York artist Julian Lethbridge presents simple linear webs that form an alligator skin pattern across the canvas. The surface is thick, scarred with brush marks or sweeping impressions of the artist’s gesture. With the color going methodically from white to black, there is little to distract from the surface or the mark and that seems to be Lethbridge’s point. Something of a conceptualist painter’s painter, these works reduce painting to the elementals with a thoroughness reminiscent of Robert Ryman, but with a more overt appreciation for the act of painting.

For all their intellectualism, however, there is still something appealingly down-to-earth about paintings that can carry on a straightforward formal discussion about surface while decked out in painterly animal hides or magnified skin patterns. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 625 N. Almont Drive, to Oct. 28.)