Some Aesthetic Systems With a Touch of Seductiveness

It might be going out on a limb to call Phoebe Brunner’s new paintings at Koplin Gallery fabulously provocative, but it’s safe to say that they aren’t as conventional as they initially appear.

Dry hills are dotted with oak trees, marshes are studded with reeds and rolling hills extend into what seems to be infinite space. Tricked out in electrified lavenders, golds and chartreuses, these are natural scenes twisted by dreams and fantasy.

This is a common enough tactic, though Brunner’s hallucinations are pretty benign, especially when compared with the frantic landscape vistas imagined by someone like Sharon Ellis. Yet what makes these paintings work is the seductiveness of their aesthetic systems, which may or may not have been intentional.

Each hinges on the repetition and variation of a single form--tree, plant or hillock--that has been coaxed into geometric form. Alienated from nature’s predictable irregularity, these forms enter into the realm of abstraction, which has its own set of protocols.

With its rectangular clumps of reeds lined up in alternating designer colors, “Marsh Dawn” feels at first like a Minimalist exercise and then like a game board on a computer screen, its seductiveness heightened by its pretense to logic. Perhaps this makes things sound a bit more complex than they are. In fact, Brunner’s paintings are direct--only a bit less so than you might think.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.