Santa Monica

Old Master Landscapes: On small, thick pieces of unframed wood, Joan Nelson paints glorious landscape fragments that look as though they were snipped out of the backgrounds of Old Master paintings. Dark bumps of trees cluster below a perfect azure sky, ferny treetops are silhouetted at dusk, a soft yellow light penetrates a deep brown thicket. Graced with the delicacy, luminosity and gently abraded surfaces of their sources, these tiny images in oil are simultaneously old and new.

Nelson quotes the differing visions and terrains of Renaissance and Baroque painters from the lowlands, France and Italy so pristinely that they conjure up a great swell of nostalgia for eras when landscape signified no less than an earthly revelation of divine presence. Yet, without depending on strategies of “appropriation,” the young California artist’s approach is squarely up-to-date. By condensing the painterly vision of nature into such small and distinctive formats, Nelson replenishes the genre with the sense of delight that repeated viewings and museum-sore feet may have worn thin. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., to April 8.)