O.C ART REVIEWS : Tracking David Simpson’s Revival in Laguna Beach

David Simpson is a California abstract painter whose early promise disintegrated into cautious dullness during the 1970s and ‘80s but miraculously revived in this decade.

In a sampler of his works spanning 34 years at the Laguna Art Museum (through Jan. 21), the painting that makes the strongest immediate impression is the oldest: “Red, White and Blue Stripes,” from 1959. Flag and landscape references mingle suggestively in the thin, ragged, horizontal bands of color that become stronger in hue toward the center of the canvas.

Made at the close of the Abstract Expressionist era, this gallant work seems a fitting last hurrah, mingling juicy and subtle paint-handling with a theme (the flag) that Jasper Johns had already transformed in the flat paintings he showed a year earlier in New York.

Simpson’s next decade was his most celebrated, a period during which his stripe paintings were included in critic Clement Greenberg’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” along with work by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. But this period is not represented in this small show, drawn entirely from the museum’s collection. (Most of the works were donated by the artist and his wife).

When we next meet up with Simpson in this exhibit, it’s the mid-1970s, and he is immersed in a painfully schematic form of geometric painting involving variously sized rectangles of color.

Studies of several of the paintings from the ‘70s and ‘80s reveal the calculations involved in this minutely programmed work. Less apparent is the value of all that planning.

There are certain values that geometric painting can yield: enhanced optical effects (think of Mondrian), spiritual resonance (John McLaughlin), ironic detachment (Peter Halley). But a work such as “Basil”--a cruciform shape built with multiple permutations of squares and rectangles in yellow and black--has the smug look of a puzzle someone has already solved.

Simpson, who turns 68 in January, finally began to loosen up again in the past few years. The most recent paintings are meditative one-foot-square blocks of color on unprimed canvas. Their subtle perceptual effects derive from the distinctive qualities of his oil or acrylic pigments and the way he layers them. The green swath of “Absinthe II” glows with an internal white light; “Yellow Gold” has the worn luster of old silk.

These paintings could do with better gallery lighting to bring out their increasingly delicate modulations. When an artist in a rut finally climbs out, his triumphant reappearance shouldn’t be half-hidden from view.

* Paintings by David Simpson, through Jan. 21 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, free for children under 5. (714) 494-8971 .