ART REVIEWS

Step This Way: A set of pine steps with two risers stands in front of a vast canvas painted a dull, unvariegated shade of black. The 7 1/2-by-14-foot “picture” doesn’t so much hang on the white wall at Angles Gallery as coat it, absorb it, envelop it--along with the viewer poised before it.

Overwhelming and minimal at the same time, the painting provides the backdrop for a drama that is due to unfold. The pale-toned steps say nothing, but they imply both a journey and a destination.

A stairway to heaven? A passage to India? The high road, or a road leading nowhere?

This curious tableau, the “first refrain” of Allan Graham’s extended visual poem “Cave of Generation,” reactivates a very old, very romantic notion of painting. The key postulate is this: The work of art is a vehicle that can carry the engaged viewer off to another time and place, to a state of meditative withdrawal, into speculation, toward revelation.

Postmodern theory has, of course, dismissed such notions as ideologically loaded; the painting is not a metaphysical site but a material object, a commodity ripe for fetishization. The seduction--and the danger--of Graham’s art is that it makes what we know to be a retrogressive formulation seem wildly progressive.

The group of paintings that comprises “Cave of Generation” consists of two “refrains” (the second the mirror image of the first), and in between them, 16 “passages,” each 7 1/2 feet tall and ranging in width from three to 14 feet. The composition of these images is restricted to expanses of black, gray, ocher and white, juxtaposed in various combinations: the canvas sliced into two rectangles of black and white, a slash of black interrupting a field of white, and so on.

Due to space limitations, the current installation is limited to the “first refrain” and six of the “passages.” Since the cycle has been fragmented, however, it is difficult to experience it as one would a poem. The rhythm has been altered, the transitions are presumably less fluid, and the “second refrain”--the work’s all-important coda--is absent. Nevertheless, the paintings work powerfully as discrete units.

Graham has learned a great deal from predecessors such as Barnett Newman, whose Herculean fields of color codified modernist painting as spiritual theater. Yet the anxiety of influence is nowhere in evidence, for the territory that Graham stakes out for himself is emphatically Postmodern. In insisting upon the presence of the pine steps, Graham evinces a canny self-consciousness about painting’s claim to spirituality and theatricality; the irony is that he basks in them, nonetheless.

In the end, Graham’s faith in the metaphysics of painting is most probably misplaced. But in this age of galloping skepticism, that faith provides us with a necessary--if not necessarily (or even hopefully) definitive--countertext.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Saturday .