Kheradyar Reshapes Space With Flowing Transformations

Long maligned as hallucinatory melodrama, Op art has been slowly working its way back into the conversation, through Philip Taaffe’s 1980s homages to Bridget Riley; Jennifer Steinkamp’s pulsating video projections; and now, in Habib Kheradyar’s writhing ode to moire, at Miller Fine Art.

Kheradyar has covered an entire room in the winningly garish material: three walls in black, the fourth in a luscious pink. The irregular, wavy, even watery quality of the fabric, heightened as it catches the light, causes all sorts of Alice in Wonderland effects to take place: Walls quiver, the ground shifts, one loses one’s bearings--happily, I might add.

However, transformations usually entail violence of some sort, and indeed the piece smothers the room that contains it. Doors and windows are leveled into two-dimensional pictures, dysfunctional traces of the living, breathing space that once was. I suppose you could read this as a wry commentary on art’s will-to-power, but I wouldn’t. Kheradyar is too sly for such grandstanding but thankfully not above theatrics.

* Miller Fine Art, 8720 1/2 W. Pico Blvd., (310) 652-0057, through May 10. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.