Santa Monica

Craig Antrim is a champion of the enduring, if sadly unfashionable, notion that art-making is a personal quest for understanding and excellence. Instead of producing cynical commentaries on the hopelessness of doing anything original or emotionally affecting in a media-controlled epoch, he paints archetypal images intended to stimulate self-awareness. Whether or not they succeed depends in part on viewers’ receptivity, but some of his new works certainly roll out the welcome mat.

Collectively, this body of work is called “Dwellings” (in reference both to places and states of being) and it was inspired by visits to the ancient sites of Stonehenge and France’s cave paintings. Most of the paintings present a simple house or door shape, first drawn in charcoal, then painted in acrylic and finally built up in oil and wax. Executed in vivid colors, thick black lines and nubby surfaces, these symmetrical images function as iconic monoliths or portals that draw viewers into radiant centers. Some paintings dissipate potential power into material distractions, while the best put one in mind of Rouault and Jawlensky. One work on paper, called “Moonlight Monument,” burns particularly brightly.

In contrast to the vast array of small and medium-size works, a 8-by-12-foot triptych is a study in expansive space and the process of painting. It’s called “Dance, the River,” in honor of Matisse’s “Bathers by a River” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Dark lines and bright halos pierce the vast white space in Antrim’s homage, suggesting images that might emerge on a clean slate of imagination. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to June 19.)