Santa Monica

A Bow to Stella: Geometric abstraction in its old, pre-Neo-Geo form can’t be dead so long as young Richmond Burton is making such gorgeous work with such spare means. In his first one-man Los Angeles show, he bows to Stella’s early black paintings with a freshly conceived homage. In the “Thought Plane” paintings, Burton charges the canvas with wispy but immaculately spaced sets of curving concentric lines--the spaces between broad passages of black paint.

The patterning of the lines creates one or two unpainted passages in each painting that take the form of small Gothic arches or shields. Burton’s technique is essentially mechanical--small weathered wood blocks attached to the edge of the canvas at various points mark the springing points of the lines. Yet the medieval symbolism suggested by the radiant shapes of the voids and the rhythmic, massed presence of the lines combine to suggest the reverberant power of an echo throughout a vast, empty sanctuary.

After these paintings--there is also a series of drawings that works out the same theme--Burton’s other pieces seem slightly anticlimactic. Yet he somehow finds a newly captivating way to enthrall the eye with the perceptual tricks of geometry: The L-shaped black-and-yellow forms of “Vertical Space 2” pop in and out and up and down with vertiginous grace. In “Fissured Space,” diagonals shooting from each side of the painting meet in the center as if engaged in a ceremonial presentation of swords--another medieval flourish that accompanies Burton’s monkish delight in geometrical follies. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, to March 17.)