Venice

Old New World: It’s hard to understand why a younger artist would want to tread ground flattened years ago by hundreds of feet. What makes 36-year-old Wesley Kimler want to turn out Abstract Expressonist paintings now ? In an essay in the New Art Examiner in 1986, he made a distinction between “the act of painting as opposed to the craft of picture making.” Needless to say, he put himself firmly on the side of the Act. He unabashedly applauded such notions as “bringing the subconscious into existence” and “tragic heroism” and the action of “creating a new world.”

Such grand, antique rhetoric would seem to require an equally grand set of canvases to go with it. But Kimler’s paintings don’t fit that bill. There is nothing visibly personal or searching about them. Oh, all the usual signs are present: the slash and drip, cut and parry, scuff and sweep in dry and wet brush attacks. In the end, though, the paintings look like countless other products of the Ab-Ex sensibility. There is something sadly tame about all this fuss and fury, something almost formulaic. This is not a new world; it’s a depleted land that has nothing more to yield.

In the other gallery, a treasure trove of Mughal and Rajput Indian miniatures from the 16th to the 19th centuries, curated by Terrence McInerney, yields many pleasures. Exquisitely refined details, lustrous mineral and vegetable colors, and amusing and tender scenes give this court art its perennial allure. Love is a frequent theme. A nobleman climbs to the window where his beloved waits by night; a gaunt man who has nearly starved himself to death to prove his devotion carries a delicate wreath to his moon-faced lover. A ruler might be immortalized as the leader of a vast procession of bejeweled wives and footmen or in lone splendor--as was Emperor Shah Jahan, a solemn white-haired man in a flower-patterned vest who holds a single posy.

Other paintings in the show are of vivid narratives (“A Thief Pursued”), religious figures who take animal and human form, acrobats and jugglers, artlessly simple court amusements (“Ladies Tossing a Flower”) and floral details from the Taj Mahal’s architectural decorations. Most unusual of all is a 10-foot-tall meditation diagram of the Cosmic Man, a giant whose body carries brightly colored, repetitive rows of placid, “supernormal” states of existence and hellish, “subnormal” images of enslavement, fragmentation and bestiality. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., and 77 Market St., to March 17.)