Ed Moses, never one to shy away from work

Veteran artist Ed Moses is at top form in eight new abstract paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery. Exuberant yet fully controlled, these works are long on graphic punch but, as always, keyed toward more numinous ends.

Moses has long been attentive to art’s mundane material properties -- to an obligation to transform the routine stuff of canvas, panel and paint into something marvelous and strange. With so much lively abstract painting being done by younger artists today, the example set by Moses, 77, is bracing.

Black is the dominant pigment here, although warm golden brown, red, violet, Kelly green and other hues are not in short supply. Moses uses black to a seemingly contradictory end: It carries the sense of copious enthusiasm that courses through these paintings, while acting as a foil for insouciance. (Think “serious play.”) Many of the paintings are dark, but none is grave or somber.

“Shjib,” among the most beautiful, is emblematic. A 6-by-5-foot vertical canvas, it positions a viewer at arm’s length from its surface, which is marked with narrow, looping black lines set on the diagonal. The radiant ochre ground is subtly streaked with red and splotched with gold, as if the canvas had been soaked with thin pigments, folded, hosed down and otherwise rudely manipulated before finally being stretched for display. With Moses, you’re always aware of the physical work in a work of art. He courts a just-the-facts-ma’am plain-spokenness.

In this age of fabricators executing artists’ directions -- which is certainly a legitimate way to go -- Moses italicizes craft. Making is paramount, regardless of whose hand is doing it.

The paintings’ scale and verticality underscore that bodily connection. Even when the overall width exceeds the height, as in the diptychs “Check” and “Ditarow” (a homespun play on the Enlightenment philosopher Diderot), the painting doesn’t read as horizontal, but as a pair of vertical panels hanging side by side.

Moses’ looping lines bear superficial resemblance to the graphic marks in paintings by Cy Twombly or Brice Marden. Their effect, though, is different -- more in keeping with the chromatically intense work of Sam Francis than with the literary associations of the others. The visual form is not the same -- you’d never mistake a Moses for a Francis -- but a shared spirit resonates.

Like elusive tracks in a cloud chamber, a line might splatter, fray and dissolve into nothingness, then reconstitute itself and continue on its way. (Most loops seem to have been squirted on with a hose, rather than brushed.) Elsewhere the line appears to be the residue of a long-gone action, washed away like footprints in the sand. Occasionally the surface is lightly dusted with sparing bits of glitter -- which has no business seeming anything other than cheesy but nonetheless seems right at home, like mica chips in asphalt.

Oddly, these works appear to have been not simply painted, but also “unpainted” -- sort of painted-in-reverse, as if the artist’s actions with his materials erase as much they add. Positive marks can evanesce into negative space. Emptiness assumes density and visual weight. Line takes on a third dimension -- then a fourth. Moses starts with a contemporary Western orientation to process and arrives at an ancient Eastern poetics associated with Zen. It makes for a terrific ride.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 6587-3373, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Now, to cut to the heart of the matter

Lecia Dole-Recio is a whiz with an X-Acto knife. She uses the blade to slice open the surface of a painting, like a surgeon delicately probing beneath skin, or a master chef fileting a flounder. No wonder her quiet work draws you in, slowing perception to a crawl.

For her second solo show at Richard Telles Fine Art, Dole-Recio has slightly turned up the volume on color and slightly turned it down on physical gruffness. Cardboard is gone, with paper, vellum and tape offering translucent and opaque counterpoints to the small geometric holes delicately cut into the surface. In one work short stabs of purple, green, yellow-gold and crimson paint are visually woven together like the warp and weft of fabric, lending a bruised, autumnal feel.

Dole-Recio cuts small, irregular squares and diamonds in the paper, sometimes inserting another piece of cut paper back into the hole, or covering it with tape. Lozenges and ovals are pasted or painted onto some bits of paper, visually tilting the picture plane or giving it gentle torque.

The tattered surface that results is like a shattered grid -- a two-dimensional plane that has splintered and broken up. You look at, into and through this work, negotiating subtle differences between representation and reality. Is that a shadow or a stab of paint, a piece of applied tape or the gallery wall peeking through from behind? Casually tacked to the wall, the squarish, collaged paintings disassemble and reassemble themselves.

With skill and originality, Dole-Recio navigates through a conceptual space that Duchamp famously described as the “inframince” -- a made-up play on French words (meaning low and thin) that suggests the excruciating nuance of phenomenological difference encountered in modern life. Just three paintings (and one little study) hang in this spellbinding show, but it offers more absorbing interest than exhibitions many times its size.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

A nice ambience, due to the views

Of two videos by Jessica Bronson at Anna Helwing Gallery, the more modest and unassuming one is finally the more compelling. The other is a kick to look at, with its high-intensity color and kaleidoscopic views. But “golden itself,” as the three-monitor work is titled, has the cumulative virtue of environmental ambience on its side.

“Golden itself” is a simple exercise in video depth of field. Bronson’s stationary camera is trained on leafy shrubbery blowing in the breeze. No soundtracks intervene on the pictures.

A pair of flat-screen monitors zooms into the greenery, bobbing amid the glinting sunlight, while bright blue sky establishes a flat background color. Closest to the camera, and thus out of focus, branches become hazy blurs of shifting color that interrupt the view.

Farther down the wall, a third monitor reverses the depth of field. Fingerlike leaves, tightly focused, hang down into the frame. Meanwhile, the background dissolves into a blustery swirl of blues, greens and flashes of gold.

In the triptych, nature’s flux seems at once beautiful and ominous, familiar and alien, close at hand yet way out of reach. An unexpected poignancy envelops this unadorned work, which captures a sense of worldly estrangement as old as the book of Genesis.

By contrast, the second video, “five lobed and propagating,” uses a kaleidoscopic lens to turn close-ups of lusciously colored flowers into devouring, sexualized maws. This beckoning mouth of hell is counterpoint to the paradise videos in the other room. Its hypnotic rhythms are underscored by a low-level soundtrack, pulsing like ambient sonar.

Five stills from the flower video are mounted nearby on acrylic sheets, but they lack the clarity and visual ferociousness of the DVD. A large sculpture, which translates the undulations of a topographical map into an environment built from corrugated cardboard, wraps around the walls of the larger gallery. Its stepped form alludes to bleachers, where spectators might take in the show. But finally it’s too inert an object to function as more than an environmental footnote. The real action is on screen, in what might be called videos for airport waiting rooms.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 202-2213, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

History lures, the future seduces

Philadelphia artist Randall Sellers is a gifted miniaturist who travels from the Roman Forum to Seattle’s Space Needle in pictures no bigger than an index card. Using a mechanical pencil with a point as sharp as a needle, he renders tiny drawings of cityscapes that seem at once deeply familiar and utterly impossible.

At Richard Heller Gallery, 15 graphite drawings, each 8 by 10 inches and all horizontal, constitute his solo gallery debut. Isolated islands adrift in the whiteness of the page, the drawings layer history with flights of imagination.

A classical arcade with elaborate Corinthian columns might lead to a radio tower, its antenna pointed to the stars. A Jetsons-style house rises up over a medieval hill town, all ruined walls and mossy doorways. Aqueducts merge into the Autobahn.

No people are glimpsed in Sellers’ urbane worlds. Still, sexuality is wittily implied. Deep tunnels and tumescent skyscrapers abound, as if cities could generate themselves through an intercourse of construction.

Sellers ties these vistas together with roadways -- some of which leave the ground at vertiginous angles, becoming avenues for the eyeball alone. Peering into these fantastic landscapes (a magnifying glass is available at the front desk), you find yourself mentally climbing hills and towers to get a better view. Rarely are the lure of history and the seduction of futurism so pleasurably entwined.

Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.