Santa Monica

With undeniable painting skill, Nelson Valentine fills very large canvases with convincing, all-over billowy cloud formations. These clouds have believable vaporous volume, and are massed flush to the picture plane a little like those Midwestern skies after a storm when dense cotton candy clouds pile themselves high along a nearly invisible horizon. There is no horizon here, just a blanket of clouds abstracted from any context and painted in a range of indigos that runs from silvery whites to deep blackish blues.

Right at the center of canvases, Valentine manipulates the sheen and density of paint to create an almost baroque effect of dramatic, exaggerated light about to explode through the scene. Handled with a similar delicacy of edging and transparency, Valentine superimposes over clouds images of neat squares floating on the picture plane as if they were materializing from the stratospheric gases.

The work might be described as a collision between Turner and Malevich or a variation on Ed Ruscha’s sumptuous skies with Pop’s delinquent smirk neutralized to a polite, dignified nod. It doesn’t really matter what Valentine is up to, the indigo series are handsome and appealing. When he gets too literal in a series of black-and-white works that combine soft hills and shorelines with geometry, the chemistry between tumultuous nature and ideal platonic form fizzles into decoration. (Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., to Jan. 6.)