La Cienega Area

“Self-taught” is a claim liable to raise eyebrows in today’s heavily credentialed art world, but Virginia-born, Los Angeles-based Christopher Deeton makes it anyway. The visionary qualities of color are his primary fascination.

Last year he was doing lush work in windowlike formats. In one untitled painting, a wispy blue-green painted “frame” with an orange dot in the center, like an Indian woman’s beauty mark, opens up into rectangular pits of darkness. Another ’87 piece encloses intense, bleeding red rectangles with a spectral green border edged with purple.

This year’s paintings are much larger and depend on the power of specific hues and quietly inflected brushwork to conjure up states of mind.

“Cote d’Azur” is a viscous, gleaming medley of blues with faint horizontal diamond patterns just below the surface. In “Oslo,” a ruddy black field gives way to a leaping blue lower edge like a seepage of exotic gases. “Are Friends Electric,” a gray field shot through with horizontal waves of mauve and pricked with scattered soft white markings--like objects seen through fog--emits a slow, steady pulse. (Marc Richards Gallery, 8747 Melrose Ave., to May 7.)