Wilshire Center

Denzil Hurley comes from Jamaica, and his small untitled paintings are shorthand memories of colors and forms baking under the sun or sequestered in darkness, as translated by someone who has absorbed the lessons of contemporary abstraction in art school.

Quick and rough in a way that’s at once offhand and effortful, these intimate works are done an injustice by being spaced at huge, grandiose intervals along the wall of the cavernous front gallery. Crosses and cross variants pop up frequently, suggesting an all-pervading religious force. One is a T-shape that clings to the upper portion of a faintly gridded yellow background.

Other paintings feature circular or shyly collapsed rectangular forms. On a bumpy yellow ground, a thick red circle that peels up along its lower edge to reveal a sliver of black shadow is surrounded by an orange halo effect. On a greenish-gray ground, an off-center triumvirate of colors lines up in stoplight formation: brick red, green, black. Looming out of another canvas, a crooked, dusty black “window” crossed with faint Caribbean-blue bars gives poverty a brave, lilting song.

Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is a 30-year-plus veteran of a particularly shocking and visceral form of performance art, which he calls Orgies Mysteries Theater. This work has involved the ritualistic use of animal entrails, carcasses and blood as well as self-mutilation. Nitsch also stages Action Painting events.

His “Vienna Secession” mixed-media works on paper are relics of one of these performances. Big red spills glide and trickle and splash on black-splattered backgrounds that incorporate footprints and the occasional impressions of small unidentifiable objects. Named after the building where they were created rather than the turn-of-the-century art movement, the drawings were cut down from big sheets of paper covering the floor.

When passages didn’t strike the artist as being pleasingly spontaneous and “attractive,” he reworked them. The results contain the free play of unwilled gesture familiar from Action Painting with grittier, cruder overtones, a celebration of soiling as an elemental human impulse. (Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to June 18.)