Past and Present: Christopher Pate’s captivating paintings...

Past and Present: Christopher Pate’s captivating paintings at Miller Fine Art look fresh and contemporary, yet seem to belong to another time. Their smart compositions, exquisitely mixed colors and lovingly finished surfaces suggest that they’re from a long-gone era, one in which craftsmanship and artistry went hand in hand, as did abstraction and modesty, along with seriousness and decoration.

The only way to reconcile such old-fashioned concerns with the crisp, up-to-the-minute vividness of the young painter’s abstract panels is to think of them as being entirely of the present--but, a present whose history is significantly different from the one that led up to today.

In your mind, erase about 60 years of art history, and go back to Jean Arp’s playfully shaped wall-reliefs that are generally dismissed as being senselessly decorative. Then fast-forward to mid-century Southern California, where John McLaughlin was using odd combinations of color to paint increasingly abstract still lifes and Karl Benjamin was building vibrant images with interlocking columns of equally strange colors.

Next, return to the present, where Pate’s new paintings enter the picture. With a giddy mix of verve and cluelessness, these insouciant works act as if Arp, McLaughlin and Benjamin were the most important artists of the century: simply the richest, most stimulating sources to be found.

Not many art historians would go along with this proposition. But while you’re looking at Pate’s quietly vivacious images, it’s difficult to resist the feeling that you’ve fallen through a time-warp and landed in a parallel universe.

These eloquent paintings actively rearrange the past, making it seem as if art history naturally led up to them. Taking viewers on flights of fancy that always come back to the present, Pate’s handsome panels redeem overlooked moments of history to make current art viewing more interesting than it would otherwise be.

*

* Miller Fine Art, 8720 1/2 W. Pico Blvd., (310) 652-0057. Through Saturday.