Wilshire Center

“The Waves” is a suite of mixedmedia prints by Frank Stella faultlessly printed by Waddington Graphics in London and full of Stella artistry. First, it all looks so easy. You stand before the slap-dash plastic finery for a while before you realize that this engaging chaos has at its core a linear, classical build up of color and form.

If you doubt the thoughtfulness Stella is known for, note that works often require as many as 50 carefully calibrated layers of silk screening, lithography, collage and hand-applied pigments. In each print a washy underlayer of color coagulates and bubbles like sea foam or gooey paint sponged onto glass.

This is topped by a flat, centrally placed disc that holds rigorous abstract designs like the maze patterning of oriental art. One can’t pinpoint depth cues and this is part of Stella’s vitality, but from here it looks as if this stable background structure is--in turn--covered, enclosed, pierced and shattered by an unimaginable array of printed, collaged, and hand added color.

Storyline is taboo for the staunch formalist Stella, but the prints speak in spite of their maker. In “Moby Dick” a frothy field of Kelly greens and blues swirls behind a disc of bright-orange arcs borrowed from Stella’s fan works or from kimono fabric. From a low-lying whirlpool of color, an ebony blob oozes toward us like the sinewy flesh of those huge endangered mammals cruising the churning waters of the Pacific Rim.

With the sure, gliding strokes of a Japanese brush master, Marc Katano paints large scale vertical reeds strung with turgid spores, or oval shapes lined along their circumference with upright projections to look dainty and deadly as a Venus flytrap. Executed with little detail in broad dark strokes over neutral grounds, Katano’s biomorphic imagery weds the grand mythic gestures of the ‘50s with Zen’s economy of means. (Richard Green Gallery, 834 N. La Brea to Nov. 25).