Review: Silke Otto-Knapp traverses shimmering water

Nine lovely recent seascape paintings by Silke Otto-Knapp are as visually elusive as quicksilver, more like the ephemeral light glinting off water’s surface than merely the shifting liquid itself.

She achieves this mysterious, poetic effect by trading in such opaque colors as oil paint or enamel for the transparency of watercolor – a medium with obvious similarities to a seascape’s subject. You look through her paintings’ surfaces as if through a veil.

At Overduin and Kite, the Vienna-based German artist layers mostly black or blue watercolor on canvas, then apparently strips away some color with a dry brush or by thinning and washing the pigments. The canvases appear at once densely stained and optically dry, both weighty and brittle. Shooting stars, a solar eclipse and moonlight reflected on water, sometimes in the manner of paintings by Edvard Munch, contribute to a delirious sense of Romantic reverie.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

The most obvious visual analogy is to daguerreotypes, black-and-white photographic negatives and old-fashioned cyanotypes (the precursor to blueprints), the latter pioneered in the 19th century by British botanist and photographer Anna Atkins. Otto-Knapp’s interest in techniques of printing is evident in a suite of 42 unique etchings, in which three different plates are printed at different stages so no single image appears fixed or immutable. Even though the ephemeral images show nature, they emphasize artifice.

Theatrical artifice comes to the foreground in several paintings of sailboats or choppy seas, which seem to derive from painted scenery on a stage set. Otto-Knapp orchestrates the curved shapes of sails and waves as if choreographing a dance, subsuming natural processes into aesthetic ones.

Overduin and Kite, 6693 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-3600, to June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.overduinandkite.com