ART REVIEW : Finding Excitement in the Abstract

If you give them a chance, Sam Reveles’ powerful paintings give you a thrill a minute. If this pace sounds as if it’s too slow for your contemporary, rapid-fire, image-saturated eyes, just try looking at one of these impressive abstractions at Regen Projects for as long as you’d watch an MTV video you’ve never seen.

More happens at once--and resonates much more intensely in your memory--when you look at a painting by Reveles than when you view almost any big-budget production. With whiplash immediacy, standard economies of scale are rendered obsolete by these five magisterial abstractions.

Titled “Private Adoration,” Reveles’ best painting makes you feel that you’re flying, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull--only at “Star Trek’s” warp-speed--through a colorful, suddenly immaterialized text filled with page after page of imaginary, larger-than-life-size Arabic inscribed in swirling blue flourishes.

Behind these nonsensical, full-wristed inscriptions, which appear to leap from the canvas, lie patterns and palettes the artist borrowed from religious images from Renaissance Italy. These historical referents resemble bold cartoons, made up of lively, striped patterns in loud, hot colors. They serve as the underpainting on top of which Reveles does his original work.

All of his paintings consist of wild tangles of line, sometimes rubbed into cloudy, vaporous smears and at other times laid down with freewheeling ease. Paint is always applied very thinly, keeping the surface free of angst-laden lumps. The palette is matte and usually wacky.

It’s rare to find sheer excitement in abstract paintings, and Reveles delivers this experience with breathtaking aplomb. His fourth solo show in as many years is a joy.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.