Wilshire Center

For a very long time, perhaps too long, Los Angeles artist Norton Wisdom has been toying with the image of a small rectangle positioned off-center in a field of color. He draws lines extending from all four corners to give the shape the illusionistic appearance of a tunnel burrowing into the canvas, Or, conversely, he has painted a squat, four-sided obelisk greatly foreshortened that shoots into space with its base flush to the picture plane. These colorful spatial puzzles have never knocked our socks off, yet they’ve always been confident and cocky enough to forestall summary dismissal.

Wisdom calls his new work “blank paintings,” presumably because all color has been drained. Wisdom uses only ebony oil stick to create a black matte finish over which he floats a barely decipherable black square sketched in slightly lighter charcoal, its four arms radiating out to make the familiar illusion. If we take the gallery reading materials seriously, Wisdom intends these forms to be schematic symbols for the pedestals that hold bust portraits or sculpture in traditional art. He presents his abstracted versions sans sculpture and then intentionally covers the paintings with glass that captures viewers’ reflections as they look at work.

Our reflected heads are supposed to become a kind of projected “bust” sculpture perched atop Wisdom’s schematic pedestals. The idea is that the artist eliminates signs of authorship or subject and therefore eliminates personal egos from art. The simple truth is that Wisdom has an innate knack for handsome, lustrous surface and clean form. Both the paintings and two wall-mounted sculptures of cast metal are elegant minimal artworks that stand up without all the dubious conceptual chatter. (Richard/Bennett Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 10.)