Brush strokes of completion

San Diego-born, New York-based artist David Reed had a homecoming of sorts in 1998 with “David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Aptly titled, the exhibition surveyed Reed’s oeuvre of fluid paint troweled into loopy compositions, as well as his experiments with video. The latter included Reed’s attempts to intertwine paintings with motion picture narratives by digitally inserting them into Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and hanging them in installations mimicking the film’s sets.

Substantial though it was, the 1998 survey was incomplete. In a rush for currency and in leaning toward then-burgeoning academic discussions of visual culture and new media, it passed on a compelling history -- the early years of Reed’s career.

Now on view at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery, “David Reed: Leave Yourself Behind, Paintings 1967-2005” takes viewers all the way back to when Reed was wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Reed College in Portland, Ore., after stints in a couple of East Coast residency programs.

This second chance for Southern Californians to survey Reed’s career includes nothing but paintings -- 23 of them -- and offers a chance to track the development of the work that has remained the center and strength of Reed’s practice for nearly 40 years.

The earliest works are landscapes inspired by travels in New Mexico. Some are rough-and-tumble cousins to more conventional landscapes; imagine California Impressionism done by Willem de Kooning or Reed’s friend and mentor Philip Guston.

Others take on a more Symbolist-Surrealist theatricality. Still others break down into greater abstraction. Blocks of color seem to be taken from one composition and plopped into the center of another, or the picture is fragmented into a patchwork of color, with warm and cool hues playing musical chairs, tweaking at the horizon lines and spatial logic that should neatly separate them into earth, sky, water and vegetation.

Tying these together is an approach to paint handling that is playful, indulgent and curious. The Impressionist’s concern for ethereal light gives way to the literalist’s pleasure in materiality. Each shape, shift in scale or relation between forms affords a new experiment in dragging a brush through thick paint.

The drag becomes the staple of Reed’s work in the 1970s, but it follows two paths. In one, evidenced by such works as “#42” and “#49,” illusionism and luminism disappear. The work, channeling the spirits of minimalism and process art, becomes all about the movement and the material.

Reed works with single hues, pulling horizontal strokes with a wide brush across fields of creamy white. Painted wet on wet, the color blends and marbles with the underlying white. Where the paint becomes too heavy, the sweep of the stroke gives way to the sag of the drip. Stacked up one after the other, the strokes suggest jittery handwriting or lines on a seismograph or electrocardiogram.

It was during the 1970s that Reed also developed the “Door” paintings -- referred to for their door-like dimensions. These too are defined by wide, dripping and dragging strokes, but more densely packed and wed with a new splashiness in paint handling and color. Light creeps in through these doors and back into Reed’s work.

Literalism meets luminism, and a kind of backdoor illusionism sneaks in too.

Reed isn’t making pictures here, but he is suggesting light and a vague spatiality.

Here Reed is as much a descendant of Sienese Mannerist Domenico Beccafumi, the Carracci family of Italian Baroque painters or the American Romantic Naturalist Frederick Edwin Church as he is of Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline or the Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein. This also marks the budding of the mature Reed, represented in the show by a handful of works from the late 1980s to the present.

These precision-smeared works are populated by effervescent squiggles of oil and alkyd paint, descended from the muscular strokes of mid-20th century gestural abstraction and pumped past heroism to hyperbole, embedded within a finish so glassy that the paintings seem projected onto the surface.

The technology is actually centuries old, based in Mannerist, Baroque and Romantic painting.

This is less about the voluptuousness of Reed’s gestures than his mastery of light.

Where his forebears used directional light to tell of divine entry into the world, Reed employs tricks of color, contrast and transparency to describe a light that comes right at us.

The light also comes from us, but if you’re thinking inner glow or aura, think again. Reed’s light is not spiritual but cultural. We’re talking plasma screens, neon signs, computer monitors, light boxes and movie projectors.

Reed’s paintings don’t show us dramatic light; they all but emanate it, and they do so with cinematic drama and an appeal to eyes and minds attuned to rapid-fire editing and multitasking.

Reed runs his compositions across stretched horizontal and vertical rectangular canvases that encourage us to pan and scroll as we look. He breaks them into fragments that suggest frames within a filmstrip, pop-up windows, video game levels, and picture-within-picture television. Often the fluidity of the brushwork runs into jarring discontinuities. In “#521,” it seems as though a frame right in the middle of a pan across a grand piece of abstract tagging somehow got left on the editing room floor.

Reed never returns to picturing the world of his early work, but he does picture a quality of this world. His jump cuts, freeze-frames, and freeze-ups format and punctuate what ultimately are motionless motion pictures. It’s a cool mania encapsulated in brushwork akin to the passing magic marker on a film leader, a graffiti writer’s scrawl or the whir of lines that in cartoons denote a scuffle or ruckus.

Reed’s works show him to be what poet and critic John Yau, in the exhibition catalog, calls a “painter of postmodern life,” not by apologetics for abstract painting or by flaunting hipster aspirations, but by simply capturing some of the visual lurches -- and a touch of the spirit -- of an age in paint.

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‘David Reed: Leave Yourself Behind, Paintings 1967-2005’

Where: The Harriet & Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays; closed Fridays and Sundays

Ends: July 15

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 343-6604; www.luckmanarts.org