Santa Monica

A half-dozen paintings by Bill Komoski look like X-Rays of aged wood siding, or infrared diagrams of brush marks made by emulsion materials reacting to a photo sensitized surface. In fact Komoski uses only a brush, matte acrylics and paste to ape the look of machine made effects.

On deep purple-blue grounds, the artist trowels a brush laden with iridescent violet paint back and forth to create lateral banding. The strips run from opaque to transparent as the paint on Komoski’s brush varies, and he intentionally alters the width of the striations to jostle readings of figure and ground. Komoski is deft at highlighting color with lighter accents to recreate the tinsely look of mylar or a photographic negative.

Highlights also give many canvases the appearance of a strong and inexplicable vertical light strafing their centers. Some of the works pantomime machine techniques so well they’re distancing and cold, but the good ones address the whole issue of gesture in post modern art.

The New York school emblazoned original gesture, the color fielders spiritualized it, Pop art spoofed and demystified it and conceptual art reduced gesture to pure matter and process. Komoski’s paintings are interesting because they draw from every point along that continuum: look awhile and they’re shimmery and transcendent, look longer and they’re poker faced puns decontextualizing the age-old brush and paint vocabulary of art. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St. to Dec. 5).