HOLLYWOOD

Scot Heywood is a Los Angeles artist who paints interlocking, three-panel abstracts in various combinations of black and white. He explores elements of composition, internal structural divisions, spatial parameters and the complex interplay of surface texture and sheen.

Such geometric abstraction owes obvious historical debts to the Utopian visions of the Russian Supremacist and Constructivist movements, as well as the later formal experiments of Ad Reinhardt. Yet Heywood’s work is less concerned with reductive processes than with exploiting the innate characteristics of pure painting, such as its two-dimensional frontality and denial of spatial illusion.

Although Heywood examines specifically “sculptural” concerns such as edge, volume and space, and the fitting together of planes to form integrated masses, he is careful to rid his work of any representational signification. The panels are turned to 45-degree angles to remove architectural associations, so that the viewer is forced to focus solely on pigment, the subtle gradations of black and white and retinal shadings that give the work its resonance.

One might argue that geometric abstraction has become a hermetic anomaly whose time has passed, a stubborn hold-out against Neo-Expressionism and Post-Modern pluralism. It has also, despite an often radical theoretical edge, become the decorative fodder of the design industry. Yet one could also claim that it is this constantly shifting aesthetic context that makes the genre even more vital, because it acts as a formal and ideological anchor. It undermines the bombast of painterly rhetoric and helps refocus it on the primary essence of the medium. In that respect, Heywood’s uncluttered and unpretentious canvases represent a breath of fresh air as a purist reaction to the aesthetic deceits of the times. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to March 1.)