Santa Monica

New York artist Michael Young lets pure geometric abstraction take a few pokes at itself without compromising any of the genre’s expected rigor. Any time dogma challenges itself with humor and elegance, you’ve got a promising formula.

Young takes the visual mainstays of geometric art: the straight edge, the right angle and the circle and intentionally subjects each to tricks aimed at putting a little humanity back in purist abstraction. Shapes take the form of odd Jasper Johns-like crosses inscribed in circles or small circles inside a larger one. There’s always some small irreverent quirk interrupting what should be an austere, clean shape, like a free-floating red dot painted right across the right angle of a cruciform as if to cancel the purity of the edge.

Young keeps some of his best canvases small and paints the shapes in earthen tones that remind us of the woody hues of sandpaper; almost immediately the “snap” of acidic Neo-Geo colors is neutralized. He undoes the requirement of uninflected perfect surface by mixing sand and earth with polymer pigments that give colors a gritty ecological personality we don’t associate with such work. He toys with illusionism by burying symbols and textures deep inside thick polyester resin glazes that seem to hermetically seal images within a layer of literal transparent space. It takes a little getting used to, but Young’s Neo-Geo grows on you. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to Jan. 6.)