ART REVIEW

Crazy Networks: Simultaneously raw and refined, James Richards’ five paintings at Shoshana Wayne Gallery rank among the most sophisticated being made today. Fiercely intelligent, these highly original abstractions could be mistaken for spastic mishaps if they didn’t deliver such snazzy visual thrills.

The best thing about the young artist’s work is that it begins with a dumb idea. Think of the most rudimentary description of a painting you can, something like: four pieces of wood attached end-to-end to form a rectangle over which a woven fabric is stretched taut so that goopy liquids may be smeared on it.

Imagine faxing this crudely truthful description to a Martian, who then proceeds to make such an object. If he gets lucky, his results might resemble one of Richards’ uncanny pieces.

The biggest difference between these inside-out abstractions and conventional paintings is that in place of tightly woven canvas or linen, Richards has loosely woven hundreds of feet of nylon and cotton string in mad, crisscrossing patterns across the rectangular opening formed by his sturdy stretcher bars. This seemingly simple maneuver efficiently transforms each work’s support (usually hidden behind it) into its frame (traditionally set in front of it).

All of the elements that make up Richards’ out-of-sync art similarly switch positions, playing one another’s roles or doing double duty. No component serves a singular purpose, making for perversely promiscuous pieces in which purity of medium is out of the question.

The crazy networks of multicolored strings function as drawn lines, defining boundaries and outlines that are usually laid down with a brush, crayon or pencil. Likewise, it’s difficult to know just where the surface is.

The clotted globs of wildly tinted acrylic that fill some of the spaces between the strings appear to hover above these chaotic webs. Shadows of both, cast on the gallery wall that’s very much a part of Richards’ see-through abstractions, complicate the picture.

In front of these slippery works, knowing what something is is much less interesting than seeing it in action. What meets the eye, and what takes place in one’s mind, are never the same thing, and Richards’ fresh, unfixed paintings make hay with this difference.

*

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.