Art Review

Luminous Color: Art that centers on the experience of light, space and atmosphere tends to have an uneasy relationship with language. Words can chafe against sensory phenomena like too-tight clothes, overdetermining and over-processing an experience that is better left naked, pure.

Michael Norton’s rich new paintings at ACME speak directlyto the eyes, the skin, the breath. The intellect can excavate them for meaning, influence and the like, but these works are capsules of being, feeling and seeing, not thinking.

Painted in egg tempera on small panels (no more than 20 inches per side), they resonate like tone poems, all atmosphere and mood rather than narrative description. Suffused with color and light, they are vaguely grounded in the recognizable world through a density of color toward the bottom of each image, which suggests land, a horizon; but any concrete association with place is wholly elusive.

Norton paints and sands his surfaces, layering and smoothing the panels to a matte finish dense with the sturdy translucence of egg tempera. One painting takes the color scheme of rust, and the streaks and burnished oranges look as much like the result of an organic process of corrosion as they do the additive work of the brush. Another is a symphony of delicate dawn pinks and blues, another a melange of teal, grays and white.

Within narrow chromatic ranges, Norton eases gorgeous effects of luminosity, shadow and texture. The paintings bring to mind the recent slicker work of Stephen Hannock, which, like Norton’s, extends a 19th century Luminist tradition identified with Inness, Whistler and Turner. These quiet meditations are worthy heirs.

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* ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-5942, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.