Review: In Albert Contreras’ hands, Xs and O’s form wild statements colored with a little magic

Albert Contreras’ latest exhibition at Peter Mendenhall Gallery is a lot like the one he had there in December 2014: Two rooms jampacked with square panels onto which the 82-year-old artist has scooped shovelfuls of thick, gloppy acrylic and then, using customized palette knives, troweled an X or O into each.

If you are one of those people who “reads” art — by looking at works primarily in terms of signs that signify various meanings — you’ll see little that is different in Contreras’ new paintings.

But you’ll miss what Contreras does with color, which is flat-out extraordinary. It’s also something he has not done since 1971, just before he took a 25-year break from painting — to clear his head and find out where his love of painting had gone.

Back then, Contreras mixed colors, blurring the edges of circles and rings so that they bled into one another. Since he returned to painting in 1997, he has not mixed colors. Instead, he has painted like a sculptor, treating each color as a singular entity — as an object to be piled atop other objects or juxtaposed to them.

But nine months ago he turned his attention to the magic that happens when colors mix. That’s when his works got painterly. Super painterly. And they did not cede an inch of their sculptural effect.

Bold, stunning and sexy, Contreras’ new paintings let everything rip. In his hands, Xs and O’s are not letters of the alphabet so much as they are launching pads for eye-popping, head-spinning, mind-blowing visual dynamics. Out-of-this-world sensuality, crazy abandon, whiplash decisiveness, fanatical focus and casual perfection come alive.

No two of his 48 paintings look alike. Not one is a dud. And it’s just about impossible to choose a favorite. Nearly every one stops you in your tracks, shocks you with its beauty and takes your breath away with its simplicity.

Contreras mixes glitter, iridescent pigments and tiny plastic beads into his paints. He paints wet-on-wet. Each speedy sweep of his palette knife scoops up buried colors and lets them fly.

Contreras lets physics do its thing. The paint’s viscosity and the knife’s force determine where the paint comes to rest, how the colors mix and how thick it all gets.

Different tools, gestures and amounts of physical force result in different thicknesses, surfaces, textures. Some slabs of paint are opaque. Others are translucent. Most are both, varying from one section to another. All result in different colors.

Some combinations make sense, as when red mixes with blue to yield purple. Others defy logic, as when black and white combine to form blue or green or even pink.

Some parts of some paintings change color when you move around them, shifting from peach to tangerine, harvest gold to fluorescent yellow, or rosy red to deep burgundy.

Contreras’ existential paintings reveal that you have to see — really see — for yourself. Experience precedes meaning, every day of the week.

Peter Mendenhall Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 936-0061, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.petermendenhallgallery.com