ART REVIEWS : A Whirlwind Tour of Geometric Abstraction

Geometry has the same pristine appeal for certain abstract artists that a field of new-fallen snow has for a child. The perfection of geometric art stands apart from the flaws and accidents of the real world. And the artist remains in full control, bidding line, space and color to resonate with spiritual meaning or wink with subtle perceptual trickery.

An exhibit of geometric abstraction from the last 40 years by 20 American artists offers a whirlwind exposure to distinctive personal styles, from super-cool to hot-cha. Although the crasser forms of Neo-Geo are conspicuously absent, some of the younger artists give the pious tradition of geometric art a good kick in the pants.

Influenced by Mondrian, Russian-born Ilya Bolotowsky evoked spatial equipoise by pitting numerous small horizontal and vertical bars of primary color against one another. Looking at his “Golden Tondo II,” the eye works to straighten out a lurching vertical cushioned by a busy matrix of colored lines.

Robert Mangold’s cerebral, reticent pieces also deal with alterations to the geometric norm. In “Square Within Rectangle (Blue Gray),” a white pencil line describes a misfit square that wanders off one edge of a light-blue painted rectangle, as if to acknowledge a world beyond the immaculate confines of geometry.

John McLaughlin’s uncompromising compositions of rectangular blocks on a rectangular field were ways of picturing emptiness, the sustaining void of Eastern mysticism. On the white ground of an untitled painting from 1951, a spare arrangement of small black bars of varying lengths and widths hovers sympathetically alongside a black rectangle.

Other members of the old guard include Joseph Albers, who persistently investigated the theme of color perception with his concentric color squares; Gene Davis, who specializes in rhythmically energized vertical sequences of color bands and lines; and Al Held, who turns geometry into a sci-fi landscape in “Geocentric I.”

Among the most quietly delicious pieces are Sean Scully’s horizontally striped black square, revealing subtle shadings of rose and green, and Dorothea Rockburne’s “Melancholia,” a cut-out rectangle and triangle made of lithographed translucent paper, which cling forlornly to one another on a vast sheet of white paper.

And then there’s the younger generation. Jim Iserman’s untitled square piece has a square cut-out in the middle and an eye-popping circular pattern in noisy greens, pink and orange that gleefully shoves Pop Art down Minimalism’s throat. In Mary Heilman’s “Red Wave,” a ragged, tortuously over-painted duo of right angled forms straggles over a white field, plaintively recalling stubbornly--humanly--irregular behavior.

Marc Richards Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Oct. 27.

Yuppie Geometry: Andrew Spence has no truck with spiritual matters, perceptual games or the meaning of art. His reworkings of the geometry of daily life are briskly elegant and down to earth at the same time.

“Traffic Circle” is a chunky black-and-white circle on a red ground; in “Garden Painting” a strict blue-on-white grid guards a central square of fresh green turf. Other large, cheerfully outgoing abstract paintings evoke the shapes of a basketball backboard, a race track, a stepladder, a tent and a greenhouse.

In this medium-cool work, the act of painting obviously counts, even if it doesn’t attain show-off status. You can see the traces of brushwork and perceive the pleasure involved in setting down one vivid color neatly next to another--rather like a wistful throwback to Crayola days.

The subject matter also exudes a sort of gung-ho yuppie mood, an abstracted edition of scrubbed L.L. Bean catalogue verities. Spence’s world seems to be a bright realm of good sports, green thumbs and social harmony, served up in the preppie primary colors of old school ties.

James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to Oct. 20.

Neutral Observer: German artist Thomas Ruff has perfected a way of making art that reveals absolutely nothing about himself and as little as possible about his subjects.

He has made strictly frontal Cibachrome photographs of house exteriors that reduce each one to the flatly minimal terms of exterior walls, grass and sky. His Ektacolor portraits of attractive young men and women--some of which are included in this exhibition--resemble gigantic passport photos, taken at a moment when no one was blinking, smiling or registering the slightest perceptible emotion.

These are faces telegraphing neither beauty nor ugliness, faces that lack identifying marks or blemishes. Other than obvious indicators of race, age and sex--and possibly class (as a function of grooming)--these people tell us nothing whatsoever about themselves.

Most recently, Ruff has taken on the universe. His “Sterne” (Star) series consists of mammoth Ektacolor photographs of the night sky. In a simulacrum of scientific method, each image is labeled with the exact time of day and the position of the sky on the celestial sphere.

All notions of “the sublime”--that 19th-Century posture of awe at the grandeur of the cosmos--are effectively stamped out. The blurry, blown-up stars look as insubstantial as flecks of lint on the black rectangles of sky, and arbitrary cropping makes it difficult to locate the constellations. This may well be the ultimate test of Ruff’s method: light-produced images of real luminous heavenly bodies that exist as Platonic images, too utterly abstract for words.

Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Oct. 30.

Dance of Life: What can a photograph say about a dance? How can a still image represent a work of art meaningless without movement? “Framing the Magic Circle,” an exhibit organized by dance ethnologist Irene Borger, asks lots of provocative questions, gaily side-steps pat categories, and offers a blizzard of images in various media: professionals on stage, in film and in the studio; amateurs on dance floors, at home and outdoors; and the densely personal pictographs and charts some dance-makers have devised to put choreography on paper.

Quite a few of the photographs were made by “recognized” artists, like George Platt Lynes (elegantly lit photographs from the early days of American ballet) and Robert Longo (lithographed images of young urban women in the intense postures of contemporary social dancing).

But the works as a group are absorbing primarily because of the expansive notion they give of what dancing is, who dancers are, how photographs lie and how dependent we are on context and external cues. The smart way of looking suggested by this show is offered as a friendly gift, not a highbrow lecture, and that is rare indeed.

Security Pacific’s Gallery at the Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., to Oct. 28.