ART REVIEW : Giving Shape to Nothingness

Nothing but saturated color enters the picture in Gunter Umberg’s severe paintings. More accurately, if black is the absence of all color, then nothingness itself takes shape in the Cologne-based artist’s sensuous version of Minimalism.

Three new paintings on wood and three rarely seen works on paper, from 1976, comprise this quietly gorgeous exhibition at Burnett Miller Gallery. Umberg’s black paintings hint that they mark out rectangular gaps in the gallery wall. But they don’t seem to open onto the unfathomable vastness of outer space, as much as they draw the viewer up to their exquisite surfaces.

Each of his subtle paintings consists of 30 to 50 coats of pine resin and pure pigment. The former is sprayed on, the latter brushed, first horizontally and then vertically, forming a fine pattern infinitely more delicate than the weave of canvas or linen. Light flickers almost imperceptibly across these untouchable surfaces.

Umberg’s pigment and wax paintings on translucent paper attest to his obsession with the way light affects painting. More down-to-earth than otherworldly, his deceptively empty work infuses a sense of wonder into mundane details.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.