Santa Monica

Karl Benjamin knits innumerable eccentric shapes into his now familiar abstract geometric canvases. Every time the eye blinks, taking in a few more pieces of these complex geometric puzzles, the solidity of this hard-edged structure shifts. In one work, an elongated hexagon is the focal point for shapes that change from flat color into planes, like an accordion.

This is modernism pure and simple, an example of the dictums that flatness is to be respected and only tampered with by the tricky plastic and optical relationships between straight lines and neighboring colors. The rule book comes to this veteran of contemporary hard-edge via none other than Mondrian, but Benjamin defies the orthodox with unusual, asymmetric polygons and weird color harmonies: grayed mustards, moss greens.

All this has been around for a long, long time, and Benjamin has been at his version of it for a long, long time. Some of the works show the wear, a few confirm that good theories die hard.

Faiya Fredman’s multipaneled paintings of deep mountains and canyons alternate between laboriously piled paint and quick-sketch lines. “Buddali” pulls us nose-close to a massive granite wall executed in thick layers of bright red oil where nature’s nooks and crevices are depicted by mottled pockets of black. The next panel of the diptych continues the scene, quickly shifting to a less claustrophobic vantage point where cascading boulders are rendered in airy pencil contours. The molten red canvases have an engaging intensity, but the whole idea needs a little more time in the oven. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to Feb. 10.)