ART REVIEW : ‘Abstractions’: Contrasting Temperaments : Art: Exhibition of works by eight ‘lesser known’ artists combines qualities of strength and high spirits that provide an oxymoronic charge.

It’s been many a long and weary year since we’ve seen an exhibition of Los Angeles art as bracing as “Physical Abstraction” at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions.

There is something particularly piquant about running across the eight-artist show housed in Ace’s cavernous warren of spaces in the picturesque old Deco Desmond’s building on Wilshire Boulevard’s blighted Miracle Mile. The rickety elevator operated by a real and very polite immigrant gentleman seems to carry us back to Raymond Chandler’s L.A. For a while, one is pleasantly muddled in time. What year is this anyway?

The show is revolutionary only in the ‘40s ambience of the building; it would not have been surprising in the late ‘60s. But this is 1990, and art is dominated by styles that come packaged to be microwaved into existence in three minutes flat and consumed in front of a telly, currently believed to be the font of all artistic inspiration. By contrast, this work carries us back to a time when hippie artists did their thing out of love and dedication. It is enough to make one believe the astrologers who say that this decade launches the real Age of Aquarius.

Here we have artists who delight in the seriousness of their calling. The show combines qualities of strength and high spirits that provide the same oxymoronic charge contained in the title. “Physical Abstraction” is a contradiction that makes sense once you’ve seen the show.

The artists--roughly between the ages of 30 and 40--are characterized by gallery proprietor Douglas Chrismas as “lesser known.” In fact, a good half of them have long and respectable exhibition records and all have been previously shown and respectfully reviewed, except for one common quality that glued them together: All exhibited some generic shortcoming that precluded full enthusiasm. In this show, Chrismas finds everybody without their characteristic disfiguring wart. Whether this has been achieved through curatorial wizardry or the luck of encountering them all at a new stage of maturity remains a mystery, but the results would sit gracefully in the County Museum of Art up the boulevard--or anywhere else.

Mary Corse, for example, has made radically reductive paintings since the ‘70s. Her specialty is investigating the light-reflective qualities of the same beaded paint material that makes street-corner stop signs glow at night when your headlights hit them. Although her seriousness was ever apparent, the work was bedeviled by a seductive prettiness that made it look light-minded. Now she has found a way to improve them with a jolt of the uglies.

Her big pictures most often consist of two flat dark vertical bars bracketing a large scrub of tattletale gray. It changes in the varying light provided by a curved wall of translucent windows. Looking at the work is like watching the subtle gradations of expression on the face of someone deep in thought.

Ah, how many times in the past were we sure we’d seen the last of solid one-color paintings, and good riddance? By the time James Hayward came along, everybody from Malevich to Moses had taken their turn at painting Basic Black or Totalitarian Red. Hayward seemed a redundant triple negative. But he hung in and the pictures have found themselves. He’s taken to applying paint in thick, putty-knife strokes. Oozing edges form shadow patterns that bring the work to life in line and texture. It breathes an understandable self-satisfaction through swaths of throbbing uninterrupted hue, and even seems to have a bit of fun at its own expense with the generic title “Absolute.”

Viewers familiar with Roger Herman through his oversize woodcuts know that his demon has been great talent combined with an overdose of German Expressionism. Now he rejiggers the formula into paintings--some quite enormous--that may be the most astonishing in an already boggling show. Grossly viewed, they put one in mind of overweight Jackson Pollock’s with writhing overall patterns that look like pits of tangled Technicolor leeches.

Soon, however, one begins to glimpse ambiguous bits of imagery and we see them as the legacy of epic Northern European Expressionist pictures from James Ensor’s “The Entry of Christ Into Brussels” to George Grosz’s “Metropolis.” Herman even hints at their social and moral concerns with tongue-in-cheek titles like “L.A. Melee (For Dufy).” There is, again, that same combination of intense involvement and lightness of being. This spirit says something about L.A. at its best.

Anyone understandably inclined to be put off by the promise of dreary formalism may by now get the idea that this is something completely different. A vein of good-natured irony runs through temperaments now wistful, now troubled, now joyous. Its source may be Jasper Johns, but it plays like a collective spirit of the artists, standing in their studios scratching their heads, thinking, “I wonder why the hell I go on doing this? Everybody says painting is dead. I haven’t gotten famous. Don’t want to move to New York. It’s really nuts to go on, but I just like it too much to quit.”

You inevitably think of Johns at first when looking at Pauline Stella Sanchez’s series collectively called “Run Over.” It consists of seven sets of multiple lead-gray canvases from which cantilever silver trophy cups. They are like a long, bemused meditation on the meaning of success and appear to conclude with Bob Dylan that it’s about as good as failure. She is even better in a big gray box with protruding aluminum poles called “Wave When You Get to the Bridge.” Interesting what a marked role titles play in much of the work.

Charles Fine is likewise Johnsian in his use of encaustic in paintings with niches and shelves bearing objects. Here the resemblance ends. The work, all elegant scruffy waxen grays, deals in the dematerialization of the solid forms that hold the paint. There is a spooky metaphysical edge oddly reminiscent of Art Nouveau decadents like Jan Tooroop. Fine’s loopy edges and knot-hole shapes lack the stylization of the Jugendstil but carry the same latent sexual anxiety. If there is a disturbing artist here, it is Fine.

Contrasting temperaments keep the show lively and constantly re-engaging. John Millei paints grimy-laundry abstractions that could be both undisciplined and depressing. Through some alchemy, they are neither. “Fool for Love” is dominated by a great scrub that might suggest anything from a cliff to a cresting wave. Above it hovers an oblong red planet, which looks down on a pathetic blob plummeting into the abyss. Its combination of heroic scale and affectionate lovers-leap fantasy gets it beyond mere eccentricity and into the realm of Eliot’s Prufrock.

David Amico’s paintings are big but their spirit is intimate. Most, like “Blackbird,” are wallpaper-patterned and gridded like samplers or computer circuits. But “Paravos en el Atico” is a four-paneled relief with one real object in each zone, a blue chair back, a window sash, a painted bare tree-branch. The work is sweet and candid, like a shy child at play examining the wonder of one-thing-at-a-time.

Bob Zoell has the distinction of being the only hard-edge abstractionist on hand and the only participant to show real clinkers. A couple of exaggerated flying-V shapes just don’t work, but the rest is fine. Oversize octagonal formats bear cheery, aggressive geometric shapes in industrial colors and titles like “Man in Trouble With Flowers.” They do all the optical dog-and-pony tricks expected of such art but they do them in unexpectedly lyric ways that revivify a moribund manner.

“Physical Abstraction” does not feel like the beginning of something, rather a fulfillment and summation. If it indeed marks the sunset of a way of making art, that is both a discouragement to its lovers and an encouragement not to miss this curiously reassuring show. It closes March 28 at 5514 Wilshire Blvd.