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Santa Monica

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In “Then and Now,” pairs of paintings by six artists span a gulf of as much as 32 years, offering ample opportunity to ponder the way distinctive styles have mutated or wandered off into new territories.

A small untitled Sam Francis from 1962 is a lyrical float of blue, red and yellow coasting on a spattered white ground. In “SFP89-3” from 1989, heavy pools of paint form a sextet of flower-like forms oddly reminiscent of the serial imagery of Warhol’s screen prints.

A “Still Life” by Stanley Boxer from 1960 is a dense corsage of stubby, fanatic strokes of brilliant color. In “Pasturesofforgottenchill” from 1989, the same brush-happy intensity creates a postmodern painterly stew. Day-Glo pink, metallic glints and embedded chunks of mixed-media rubble bobble together alongside big milky boulders with a comic air.

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Black verticals representing the bundles of switches held by Christ’s scourgers cut painful trails through “The Flagellation” from 1956, Stephen Greene’s luminous mosaic of orange paint. Alas, the delicately wrought strength of that painting is nowhere to be found in “Circle Encircled” of 1989. Fat strokes of alternately dry and watery pinkish, grayish paint are coaxed around a central circular area; the effect is sadly stillborn.

A vase perched on a weightless, uptilted table in Connor Everts’ “Letter From Burt” of 1954 retains nearly the same shape and position in “At the Edge of the Sea” from 1989. Gone is the questing painterliness of the ‘50s, however. In its place is a barrage of relentless detail: meticulously reproduced lettering and strictly marshaled patterns.

Al Held’s suavity remains a constant through the decades. Executed in India ink, with the edges of each broad stroke feathering out onto the paper, “66 6-A” from 1966 is a simple sequence of arcs and lines that satisfyingly reveals the sure motion of the artist’s hand. “Opus XXIII”--a watercolor from 1988--is pure Held on a small scale. Playing an energetic little game with space, it leaves the viewer somewhere in the ozone, zooming dizzily around cylinders, pyramids and a box-like room.

Karl Benjamin remains true to his classic style of flat, interlocking planes. And yet perhaps one can read the incursions of age into the differences between the staccato rhythms of “Horizontal Movement” from 1957--low-slung black shapes flickering across a canvas hopping with shy and subtle color--and “No. 5,” with its slow pilgrimage of big, angular color blocks that seem strangers to one another. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to Jan. 6.)

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