GALLERY REVIEW : Karwelis’ Paintings Seem to Return to Square One : Art: The artist’s latest works at LJ Gallery in Newport Beach look as though he is stripping everything away to begin again.

Donald Karwelis’ work has undergone numerous sea changes since the 1960s when he painted the wonderful little Abstract Expressionist seated figure in Newport Harbor Art Museum’s collection. At LJ Gallery in Newport Beach (through Tuesday), his latest paintings--images of central vertical shapes arrowing down into brushy color-neutralized backgrounds--look as though he is busy stripping everything away to begin again at square one.

Without reading the labels, a viewer might well think this was the fashionably reductive work of a recent art school graduate, rather than a new direction for an old hand.

Indeed, Karwelis, whose studio is in Santa Ana, has chased after various trends during the past few decades, never really regaining the strength of his early work. But the sobriety and simplicity of his current approach seems promising.

The shapes variously resemble industrial pipes, hoses, funnels and drill bits. Seen from slightly below or slightly above, they loom as portentously as monumental architecture, or descend into unseen depths.

In “Untitled 46-C1,” (even the titles have a no-nonsense, utilitarian sound), the diagonal wrap winding around a blue pipe--like screw threads in reverse--oddly suggests the torsion of the human figure. A puce green haze (of pollution?) in “Untitled 44-C1” forms a parenthesis around a gray pipe edged with flickers of bright primary colors.

Still to come, one imagines, are more sophisticated variants on these five-finger exercises, elaborations that will take the imagery to a more complex plane.

Also on view are two- and three- dimensional mixed-media works by Steve Heino, a young Los Angeles artist. His pieces in this exhibit generally seem more arbitrary and less thoughtful than the massive works he showed at Laguna Art Museum last year.

“Coxwain,” an elevated, suspended, translucent canoe shape, seems like a dead-end, lacking the resonance one expects from sculpture. (So? What about this canoe?) Paintings on paper of buoys look like little more than noodling around with shapes, waiting for inspiration to strike.

But Heino is running on all engines again in “Sweet and Juicy,” a small construction. Ghostly advertising images of citrus fruits on a metal lithography plate play off a segmented, three-dimensional sculptural component that curiously suggests the action of peeling apart the membranes of the fruit. The most quietly effective piece is “Passage,” an eye-fooling block of wood mounted on the wall in which an archway is made to look as though it recedes endlessly into the distance.

Financially bolstered by a third partner, Anaheim attorney David Boros, the gallery--which will be known as LJB Gallery--is expanding across the walkway into another suite of offices. The enlarged, 2,800-square-foot space, opening Nov. 20, will nearly triple the size of the tiny original space.

Recent work by Donald Karwelis and Steve Heino remains through Oct. 31 at LJ Gallery, 359 San Miguel Drive, No. 105, Newport Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and Tuesday. Information: (714) 720-0133.