La Cienega

Thin Lines, Sensuous Experience: Long, narrow, horizontal lines of thin color staining raw canvas can be a surprisingly sensuous experiences in Jeff Falsgraf’s formalist paintings. Each canvas is a large vertical divided unequally into two separate color areas that form wide horizontal bands of floating color a la Rothko.

For paintings that look so simple these take on a great deal. They explore color as a solid and un-solid simultaneously. More “painterly” than Robert Ryman, they use marks to reduce brush strokes to method and color to content. And that content is still surprisingly lush and alluring in its stripped-down state.

Tad Wiley’s enamel paint on wooden hourglass-shaped forms are also enticing but link arms with sculpture instead of painting alone. Long and gently creased, the painted forms bend out from the wall slightly at top and bottom like stiff vertical slats invisibly pinned to the wall through their midsection. That bend physically counteracts the flatness of the painting just as the sanded color allows the illusion of transparency to contradict the density of the wooden form. (Hunsaker/Schlesinger, 812 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Saturday.)