ART REVIEW

Microcosm: Mark Innerst has never feared beauty, whether he is painting landscapes, cityscapes or baseball players. In his new paintings of waterlilies at Kohn/Turner Gallery, Innerst conjures a sublime beauty, a universe-in-a-blade-of-grass kind of beauty, a spiritual epiphany in paint.

The paintings pay homage to Monet’s series of waterlily paintings and, more obliquely, to the quiet rapture of the 19th century American luminists. But these paintings are fully Innerst’s own and, as it turns out, fully contemporary, based on photographs and video stills the artist made on a canoe trip through his native Pennsylvania.

Exquisitely rendered in glassy layers, the images are of two kinds: either clusters of lily pads, like constellations of luminous orbs trailing umbilical cords in murky brown pools, or single leaves, shown frontally, as in a portrait. The images of single heart-shaped leaves are as much emanations--soulful emissions--as descriptions.

Innerst’s renderings are minute but not fastidious, never lapsing into reproductions of the leaves’ circuitry of veins. Instead, the pigment dimples and pools into images that evoke both the microscopic and the cosmic. Innerst’s paintings effect a shifting of scale that, like all significant landscape painting, requires of the viewer a positioning of the self, a reexamination of distance from the source, both physically and spiritually.

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* Kohn/Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Nov. 29.