ART REVIEW : Furbeyre: Geometry as a Turning Point

If David Copperfield made geometric doodles in his spare time, they might be three-dimensional and look something like Caren Furbeyre’s sculptures, which perform various magic of their own.

In her first solo show in 1993, Furbeyre played with the tropes of Op Art, reclaiming that debased style and extruding it into the third dimension. In her current show at Mark Moore Gallery, she holds on to some of the same concerns, but lets go of the retro flavor, especially its anachronistic futurism.

This is not to say that Furbeyre’s new work does not refer to art’s history. These assemblages are built up out of serially repeated geometric forms, like those endemic to Minimalism. Only instead of Minimalism’s stoicism, Furbeyre’s shifting stacks and progressively reversed towers of triangles and squares of color-edged acrylic are positively sprightly. They seem to bend, twist and flutter in and out of light and space, changing hues and configurations depending on where you stand and how quickly you’re willing to move.

“Corner Wheel” is the most beautiful piece in the show. Two vertical stacks of interpenetrating triangles mounted at right angles to each other, “Corner Wheel” is affixed to one end of the gallery’s main archway. From one angle, it looks a bit like a Dan Flavin neon sculpture, projecting light as color; from another, like a cascade of butterflies.

Probably the most ambitious piece begins at the gallery’s front door, extends to a glass window fronting the back room and ends up on that room’s back wall. A trio of silk-screens (whose chevron patterns recall Frank Stella) aligned along a single axis that penetrates the gallery space, this piece is about transparency, opacity and the layers that lie between them.

Standing in the middle of the gallery is like standing inside this work of art. It’s a heady experience, less like Minimalism’s embodied spectatorship than Op Art’s hallucinatory psychedelics.

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Mark Moore Gallery, 2032A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.