Review: Stakes are low and benign in Christian Rosa’s paintings

Christian Rosa inaugurates Ibid’s handsome downtown Los Angeles space with 10 large, pleasant-enough paintings. Yes, faint praise indeed, but the works exude a lightness and slightness that would make grander claims feel overblown.

Born in Brazil but mostly based in L.A., Rosa paints and draws across the surface of unprimed canvases in oil, oil stick, charcoal and pencil. The images read like scaled-up (way up, to 10 feet wide and more) scratch-pad doodles. Freewheeling circuits of looping line tease forth a path for the eye.

The lines vary in character from light and reticent to dense and determined. There are furious scrawls and playful meanders, punctuated by daubs and dollops of paint, leaching their oils into the fabric to generate auras of pure materiality.

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Somewhere on most of the canvases, Rosa plants a solid rectangular field of color, a plane resting upon the uber-plane. One is thick black pigment, agitated by finger painting. Another is a glossy cherry red, its finish-fetish perfection defied by a casual white scribble.

There’s a hint of Twombly here, only more decorous. Rosa is clearly in dialogue with all sorts of other art (his titles make reference to Dali and Schiele, at least), and relishes the play between calligraphy, diagram, abstraction and figuration, but ultimately the stakes feel low.

He hints at toughness and tension--as well as humor--in titling the works, but in making them, he seems content to follow his stream of consciousness as it burbles benignly along.

Ibid.Los Angeles, 675 S. Santa Fe Ave., 646-220-7557, through Nov. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.ibidprojects.com