La Cienega Area

The history of modern art in America includes such signposts as the hard-edged work of the American Abstract Artists group in the ‘30s and the Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell generation of the ‘50s. Italian born abstract artist Giorgio Cavallon is firmly planted in both of those artistic crucibles. He immigrated to the United States in the ‘20s, worked with Gorky in the WPA, was a charter member of the American Abstract Artists and showed his work in the pivotal 1951 exhibition of American abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art.

In this first West Coast exposure to Cavallon, it’s difficult to evaluate his significance because the abstract idiom he doggedly pursued for more than 40 years has been mined and hyped to the point of banality. In that context, Cavallon can’t help but look a little dated and weather worn.

His career shows that as early as the ‘40s, Cavallon was already using landscape and still life as a springboard for watery, expressionistic arrangements of color that remotely recall the washy geometries of Diebenkorn. His native Venice inspires the bright, light drenched patches of transparent color fitted together flatly like a free-form quilt.

One large untitled piece builds a loose abstract infrastructure, covers it over with just enough white to let the paint below show through, then slashes a band of red and a small counterpoint of yellow across the surface. Few can argue with the work’s consistency and place in the development of American abstraction. (Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Nov. 25.)