Tantalizingly off-balance works from Heywood

For the last 20 years or so, Scot Heywood has been making abstract paintings out of two, three and sometimes four rectangular panels painted a neutral shade (usually black, white or gray) and fastened together so that their outer edges fail to line up with one another. To follow the contour of any of these works, your eye has to jog, left or right, before continuing on its way around the painting’s perimeter.

At Chac Mool Gallery, six new canvases follow this format but do not invite your eye to skirt their edges. To stand before one of these paintings, each of which is the size of a generously scaled doorway, is to find your whole body involuntarily adjusting itself to the subtly out-of-whack geometry of Heywood’s art. Although you know a solid concrete floor is beneath your feet, his deliberately off-balance works make you feel as if loose sand is underfoot, and that twisting your hips to get better footing isn’t a bad idea.

Heywood’s paintings cause this reaction because they have more in common with architecture than with imagery. You don’t experience them as pictures but as objects in the world.

Scale is essential to their impact. Three smaller works, behind the desk and in the office, have the presence of studies. Unlike the six big ones in the main gallery, they go straight from the eye to the mind without involving the body.

Five of Heywood’s big paintings consist of 7-by-4-foot canvases; attached to the right edge of each is a 7-foot-tall, 6-inch-wide canvas. The skinny right sides of these extremely disproportionate diptychs hang 3 1/2 inches lower than their left sides. By dropping this part of each painting, Heywood suggests that it’s heavier than the other side. Despite being eight times bigger, the left sides seem to drift upward.

Heywood’s works also bring the gallery walls into the composition. They become negative space, defined by “notches” in the painting’s upper right and lower left corners. The generic whiteness of the walls emphasizes the sensuality of his brushed and rolled surfaces. Covered with many layers of icy white, transparent matte medium and blacks that range from dazzling to sooty, these seemingly uniform works embrace the supple variations and human warmth of handmade things.

The sixth painting sandwiches a thin panel of creamy beige canvas between (and slightly below) two blocks of pitch black, each of which is suffused with just a hint of midnight blue. Recalling John McLaughlin’s similarly minimal compositions, this horizontal painting places Heywood in refined company.

More important, it places viewers in an even more interesting position: face to face with art whose graceful serenity has nothing to do with the uncompromising rigor of logic and everything to do with the give and take of everyday life.

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Scot Heywood

Where: Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

When: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m,-6 p.m. Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m..

Ends: April 5

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 550-6792