Santa Monica

For the last 10 years, Jack Reilly has made illusionistic hard-edged works. A new direction indicates that Reilly may be an abstract artist in crisis. He shows works formed from shaped canvases stacked parallel to the wall. Each is cut to a completely outrageous free-form geometric shape that Reilly has edged at corners with gilded baroque frames. The canvas nearest the viewer typically holds a realistic classical image like a marble Dionysus sculpture in an Arcadian landscape, or a contemporary nude in a classical contrapposto stance. Behind this is a polygon panel painted in the iridescent industrial colors of junk sculpture, but with paint piled on in the thick tufts of Neo-Expressionist techniques. At the very back is a panel whose corners jut and poke from behind to show gestural rainbow pigments covering both canvas and frame in an obvious nod to both the New York School and the Minimalist notion that a painting is an object and not the illusionistic box of the Renaissance.

The show includes a statement that reads a bit like the apology of a convert, explaining that the plastic and spiritual bases for abstract art have been used up and that painting should raise questions about the nature of art from its beginnings to its present. That’s all great, but Reilly’s solution seems such a strange and sophomoric melange that it’s clear he’s groping his way across new visual terrain and hasn’t yet pinpointed a balance between the geometric work he mastered and the figurative tradition he’s rediscovered. (Boritzer/Gray, 3110 Main St., to Dec. 17.)