Ellis’ Fascination in the Remains of Passing Day

The six new paintings of imaginary landscapes by Sharon Ellis at Christopher Grimes Gallery chronicle “The Times of the Day,” beginning with the first glimmer of rose-colored daylight and ending with a hallucinatory display of stars stitched into an elaborate pattern across an indigo night-sky. As the day passes from picture to picture, this extraordinary cycle collectively forms a mesmerizing landscape of perceptual consciousness.

Installed in chronological order from left to right around the room, they follow the expected sequence: dawn, morning, midday, afternoon, dusk, night. In each, foreground vegetation is silhouetted against the sky, creating layered patterns. Like a Rorschach inkblot, the bilaterally symmetrical patterns encourage you to read them imaginatively, as open-ended pictures of more than what meets the eye.

Mostly the patterns seem to allude to body parts. The dense linear network in “Afternoon” suggests a central nervous system. Puffy, trailing clouds in “Morning” mimic an intestinal tract. The tangled floral stems in “Dusk” evoke ganglia. The silhouetted branches around a central core in “Midday” and “Night” are pubic.

Ellis paints with alkyd, a resin-based medium that allows for maximum light reflection through transparent color, which gives her pictures a distinct visual heat. (The temperature changes as the day goes by.) The bodily references in the patterns serve to escalate the erotic charge in what are already very sexy paintings.

These are easel paintings, too, each 40 inches high and 30 inches wide, which means they possess an intimate, one-on-one scale. They don’t unfold horizontally, like a landscape opening up to embrace a visual scan. Instead, their vertical orientation reflects the stance of a person confronting a horizontal vista, scrutinizing its smallest details.

The cycle radiates intense visual intelligence by evoking light in a variety of seductive and surprising ways: as visible color, sensual feeling and intellectual rigor. That light is an integral subject of “The Times of the Day” can also be seen in a subtle but telling compositional quirk.

In four of the pictures, the foreground flora and the background sky both rely on symmetrical patterning to create a precise optical pitch--sort of the visual equivalent of a sharply struck tuning fork. But, in two they don’t. In “Dawn” and “Dusk” the flora is symmetrical, but roiling the sky isn’t.

“Dawn” overlays a black pattern of climbing morning-glories on a swirling sky of mottled, roseate hues. “Dusk” sets its flowers against an even more irregular sky, which meanders from flaming orange at the bottom to pink and purple edged in reflected orange at the top. In both, the sky is a tumble of clouds and color and filmy atmosphere.

Dawn and dusk are the times of the day when light is betwixt and between, undergoing its most radical transformation. Even in these unsettled moments, when anticipation and dread mingle in equal measure, Ellis’ amazing cycle doesn’t miss a beat.

*

* “The Times of the Day,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3333, through April 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.