Art Review

Marching On: Time passes like water: It never stands absolutely still and never takes the same shape in the same place twice.

Helene Slavin conjures the fluidity of time with precious delicacy in several of her recent paintings at Hello Artichoke. Her large portraits, Crucifixion and Pieta (each measuring up to 93 inches per side) have redeeming, energetic passages, but they lack the overall presence and potency of the smaller paintings.

“Rembrandt’s Susanna,” for instance, is a breathtaking, ethereal gem. An oval just 10 inches high, the painting has Susanna bathed in a cool blue aura that radiates against a ground of warm umber glazes. The contours of her figure, like her own absorbed gaze, are unfixed, contingent.

In “Jack Delano Garment Worker,” based on a New Deal-era photograph, Slavin transforms the documentary into a poetic near-abstraction. The worker, her head bent to her labor, has chiseled features defined by deep shadow. Her hand and the material she is working on have far less substance.

They appear to be decomposing, dissolving into minute colored granules of light. A similar phenomenon occurs in Slavin’s “Madonna With Child,” a luminous icon whose vaguely suggested figures radiate a spirituality independent of material presence.

Slavin titles the show “Pentimenti,” after the traces of underlying painting that remain visible through subsequent layers and glazes. It’s an apt metaphor for the visible residue of time’s persistent accrual.

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* Hello Artichoke, 3028 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6136. Through Feb. 28.