La Cienega Area

By now Los Angeles knows Santa Barbara artist Guy Williams as a maker of loosely structured, intellectually astute geometric paintings. A painter’s painter, Williams’ work has always reflected a belief that colored paint conscientiously handled was content enough for art. Given this, his new work and his new medium come as a particularly enticing change.

Quiet, meditative emblems are built on the format of a square intersected by a single horizontal or vertical line, but they are made from tree bark!

The bark has been smoothed and sanded so finely that it resembles compressed cork. At each craggy seam, vein-like horizontal striations form, giving the work the look of geological strata. Williams remains a painter, using the natural variations in the wood’s color to modulate tonalities and “paint” moody atmospheres. “Asia No. 3” is exquisite and, though Williams is an artist quick to eschew any earthbound content, one work made from the teal-tinged bark of a eucalyptus tree (with a single filament of wood creating a central horizon line) looks just like a vast Oriental landscape at dawn.

You don’t need to see the titles of this “Asia” suite to know Williams is looking East. That there is transcendent content in repose here strikes some hyper-stimulated Americans as a little airy. The notion made contemporary art history in the works of Barnett Newman, to whom these works owe a great debt, and it’s timely and believable in Williams’ hands. (Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., to March 2.)