A Softer Tone:

Sue Williams’ subject matter has long been shamelessly incendiary: wife-beating, spousal rape, incest, child abuse. In new paintings at Regen Projects, she softens her tone, placing politics at a remove.

Scrawled words enumerating this or that autobiographical horror are banished, and even the body, with its sticklike arms, spread legs and woeful slump, is occasionally concealed behind the seductive language of color and gesture. So who could have imagined that Williams would aspire to become Helen Frankenthaler?

That may be overstating it a bit, but the shock of seeing Williams transform herself into a formalist is estimable. What’s more shocking, however, is the extent to which she transforms formalism in the process, investing some of its more sacred tropes with an emotional high and an erotic charge.

Several of the larger works are color-field paintings marked in odd places with lines or curves that suggest body parts. These ghostly, corporeal presences cue us to read the rudely applied paint that engulfs them as stains or emissions, and the violent swaths of color that punctuate them as acts begun suddenly or interrupted prematurely.

The smaller works--covered with legions of tiny black figures displaying their genitals or engaged in sex--play out Abstract Expressionism’s fascination with all-over patterns, but with a naughty, Williams-style twist. Elsewhere, excruciating fine black lines recast Gorky’s linear arabesques, and Twombly-like smudges, appearing at the edges of things, become doubly metaphorical.

Williams’ investigation of modern painting is not methodical nor is it intellectualized. It is haphazard and instinctual, part of what is sure to be a slow process of reinvention. Indeed, in the best piece in the show, Williams has already reinvented the color red, demonstrating how, detached from form, it can feel sore, raw and jubilant all at once.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Saturday.