Santa Monica

Cool Neutrality: The best audiences for Keith Sonnier’s recent work are probably urban dwellers so zoned out by their hyperactive man-made environments that they find his bland neon images soothingly meditative. His “Antenna Series” pieces are linear aluminum constructions, garnished with skinny colored neon tubes of various lengths, that hang on the wall or are suspended from the ceiling. Their shapes and titles variously suggest aircraft, a radio broadcasting tower or a phenomenon in physics. Sonnier uses neon color either to draw a bright, solid line or to offer a partially concealed source of radiant glow-power.

As soberly high-tech as a nerdy teen-ager’s project in the garage, these pieces also have clean-cut Constructivist good looks. The work exists at the meeting point of contraption and construction: Even the neon transformer boxes also serve as black geometric punctuation marks. But viewed either as abstract or figurative forms, much of this work seems thin and obvious, woefully lacking in the kind of sensory pleasure to be found in his freer, “archaic” pieces (not in this show).

Sonnier is the kind of artist who beams back aspects of his environment without appearing to comment on them. The work expresses no apparent point of view about technology. But his cool neutrality threatens to become a form of inertness. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to March 31.)