ART REVIEW : Dowell Works Provide Powerful Lift to So-So Show : Tom Krumpak is supposed to be the star of Rancho Santiago exhibit, but other abstract paintings outshine his.

If anything is likely to motivate you to visit the abstract painting exhibition at the Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery (through March 22), it won’t be the title. “ ‘Very’ Visual Dialogue”? Give me a break.

As artist Tom Krumpak writes in the accompanying brochure, he selected his own work from the past decade along with work by six Los Angeles-area artists whom he believes have influenced his style. Despite the self-serving theme, the exhibition has some wonderful things in it--most of them by Roy Dowell. Dowell’s paintings are so delicious to look at, so pleasing in a purely visual way, that even a small sprinkling of them elevates a so-so show into a must-see.

Dowell’s small pieces have become more complex over the years while retaining the lush unexpectedness, the breathtaking rightness in matters of line, color, texture and shape that eludes so many others. His earliest work in the show is a gouache painting, “Untitled No. 264” from 1982, in which a straight-edged design becomes an improbable, hi-tech flower, poking out of a body of water alongside a curvy abstract shape that looks like a cross between a bug and a miniature atomic explosion.

In his painting and collage “Elegant New Culture” from 1987, the tongue-in-cheek reference is both to artistic and laboratory-spawned forms of “culture.”

Rows of brushy concentric orange circles with brown centers (petri dishes?) are interrupted by a square of sand striped in green and white and an oblong patterned area. (Quasi-architectual scratchings of white and black on a brick red ground have a 1940s stage-decor look, recalling the work of Eugene Berman.) On top of this adroit melange, Dowell painted an airy linear pattern with Matisse-like curlicues in thick swipes of royal blue. Very elegant, indeed.

The most recent Dowell on view is “Untitled No. 589,” a collage from last year. In the jostling rhythms of this piece, the Ben Day dots used in photoengraving take on a decorative life of their own, alongside unidentifiable fragments of advertising photographs and snatches of printed lettering and a few identifiable objects. By collecting clues--like the human eye, the picture frames, the magnifying glass and the strips of what appear to be false eyelashes--a viewer might perceive a larger theme about the artist’s role: containing and concentrating what the eye sees.

None of the other paintings in the show comes close to the levels of richness--and optical pleasure--in Dowell’s work. A dispiriting thinness, glibness or tiredness haunts much of the work.

William Lane’s paintings are cautious experiments in color layering in which the rows of rectangular swatches sometimes have the effect of superimposed fabric scrims. In an interview published in the exhibition brochure, Lane explained that these works are influenced by “the space and imagery of the churches” he has seen on annual trips to Mexico.

Lies Kraal makes monochrome grid pieces that recycle minimalist austerity like so much low-key wallpaper. A piece in which tiny bumps of modeling paste mark the interstices of a faintly penciled grid on a white ground is unconvincingly titled “Buddhist Silence No. 2.”

Maxwell Hendler’s work is high on conceptual whimsy, packaging instantaneous viewing experiences as amusing little objects. He paints a small pegboard yellow as the “lite” version of some forgotten immense minimalist wall piece (“Little One”) and covers a piece of pine wood with multiple coats of resin (“Sand and Sea Club”) that exaggerate the notion of a desirably shiny surface into a three-dimensional presence that seems more engaging than the object it covers.

Anne Flaten Pixley is represented by three self-effacing drawings in an abstract, gestural vein that many others have pursued over the past three decades. “Dessin” ( drawing in French) is a spacious field of markings knitted together with gray and orange Prismacolor pencils. It’s clearly a serious piece, but it doesn’t effectively hold up its end of the conversation.

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Krumpak’s own work seems to have the most in common with John de Heras’ recent paintings. Harsh colors, flat, eccentric shapes and repeated linear elements give de Heras’s “Tower of Shame and Abandonment” a formal tension vaguely suggestive of a game board.

In Krumpak’s big canvas “For the Boys,” jumpy, brightly colored lettering and flat, curving imagery offer an unexpected counterpoint to a prayer that begins in English and segues to Spanish and Italian. The jaunty visuals are like a keep-up-your-spirits tune whistled by someone terrified of getting through the day in a violent part of town. This is all very well, but the work doesn’t take us onward from there; it seems too wrapped up in conveying one unambiguous message.

For anyone who walks away from the gallery feeling less than encouraged about the state of abstract painting today, it should be said that there are up-and-coming artists doing insouciant and wonderful new things with it--like Adam Ross, Steven Criqui, Nancy Evans and Jason McKechnie--but they’re just not in this exhibition. Maybe someone will roll up a curatorial sleeve and show Orange County what else there is.

* “ ‘Very’ Visual Dialogue” continues through March 22 at the Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery, Building C , 17th and Bristol streets in Santa Ana. Hours : 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission: Free. (714) 564-5615.