ART REVIEWS : Six Intriguing Abstractions

John M. Miller’s six new paintings at Fred Hoffman Gallery are some of the most visually arresting and conceptually intriguing abstractions being made today. They are also some of the most underrated and misunderstood paintings to come out of Los Angeles since John McLaughlin’s quietly mesmerizing images confounded viewers from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.

Miller’s extremely pared-down fields of innumerable diagonal dashes on raw canvas are often seen as the odd offspring of geometric reductivism and Op Art. Although they share elements with both of these genres, they cannot properly be described as belonging to either group.

Unlike Op Art, whose obnoxiously busy patterns drive one to dizziness, Miller’s paintings yield to a strangely serene stillness. With time, concentration and effort, one’s immediate impression that the large paintings are chaotic and cacophonous arrays of electrically charged dashes and unbalanced bars gives way to the composure that accompanies an overall view of the whole. Every perfectly painted and precisely calibrated diagonal becomes part of a flow, an element in a field whose illusionism is extremely physical.

Unlike painting indebted to geometric reductivism, Miller’s art refrains from tirelessly reiterating the relationship between the edges of the canvas and the vertical and horizontal grids these lines imply.

Miller’s excruciatingly deliberate paintings pursue the kind of clarity that flashes across one’s mind when sensation and cognition briefly intersect. His subtle art begins in the distance between perception and knowledge and momentarily brings together these often divided realms.

Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-4199, through April 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.