Berlant Leaves His Fingerprints Behind

As familiar as Tony Berlant’s work has become--especially here in his own city, where he’s had nearly a dozen solo shows in as many years--it never devolves into the formulaic or predictable. He has been using the same technique of found metal collage since the 1960s, yet remains continually inventive with it, hungrily pursuing detours and tangents from the known path. In his latest work at L.A. Louver, much of it stunningly beautiful, he revels more than ever in painterly effects and rapturous manipulations of color.

Several works repeat the image of a fingerprint, a prime tool for identification purposes but also a mark that suggests the singularity of the artist’s touch. The patterns of Berlant’s fingerprint, enlarged to gargantuan scale (up to 10 feet per side), read as storm patterns: magnificent, tempestuous, cyclonic swirls.

In “Red Hot Honey,” searing yellows and sexy fuchsia couple in the commotion. In the luscious “Neptune’s Net,” the blues toward the center are dappled with glittering silver. On the outer rings, the metal bears a photographic image of an aerial city view and, further out, abstract patterns of blue, gray, soft pinks and mauve flicker like water in sunlight.

Berlant’s pieces of metal function more and more like individual brush marks, orchestrated into grand, gestural sweeps. He continues to use found tin for its given color and pattern, but he’s also taken recently to imposing his own colors and textures on the metal. Throughout the work, broad floating swaths of color meet up with stripes of more finely articulated imagery, sometimes congealing to form a convincing pictorial space--depicting a bird on a branch, for instance--but more often striking a vibrantly tenuous balance between the abstract and the representational.

Berlant maps out the spaces in his collages by first drawing on the support’s surface. Here, for the first time, he exhibits one of those under-drawings as a finished work--and it holds up powerfully well. Its fluid ink swaths, opaque alternating with diluted, stream over the raw wood in the concentric stripes of the fingerprint, a personal code empowered in paint.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through June 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Admirable Restraint: Brad Durham takes a “less is more” approach to the landscape in his recent work at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, and the results are quietly wondrous. Given previously to painting emotion straight into his pastoral scenes though romanticized light and color, Durham now strips his images nearly bare.

The new work is pale, nearly monochromatic, and it barely whispers. But it’s all the more absorbing for its concentration and restraint.

A few broad, muted landscape views are included in the show, but Durham’s gaze works more often like a zoom lens, framing a single blossom or a lone bird. In a rich series of monoprints reminiscent of the work of Donald Sultan, individual orchids silhouetted against acid yellow or fuchsia emanate faint gray auras that charge the surrounding space.

“Subtle Bodies,” a striking sequence of eight small paintings, features single birds, again in silhouette, resting on a branch or just landing. These are humble slices of the bigger picture, but tender and elegantly rendered.

The delicate, calligraphic overlap of branches serves as nominal focus in a sequence of paintings collectively titled “Places Between.” Using only variants on eggshell, ivory, cream, pale yellows and gray, and layering them so that the forms remain elusive and veiled, Durham captures both the modesty of such views and their precious beauty.

It’s evident from his statement for the show that the artist wants his viewers to think big--about the nature of being and transcendence. Ironically, that happens most when Durham himself thinks small.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through June 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.