ART REVIEWS : Moses Expresses Emotional Force

Coming off the frenzy of the Venice boardwalk into a gallery of Ed Moses’ gently oozing liquid squiggles on paper is as close to a case of culture shock as you can get without leaving the country. All the outside hype and hustle is like big-band brassiness against the self-reflective, meditative humming of Moses paintings on thin washi paper and canvas.

Ever since Moses left the tight structure of his Mondrian-based plaid lines in 1989, the artist has worked with vigor, releasing and freshening the emotional force of the Abstract Expressionist mark. The key note in these very Zen paintings is their uninhibited sense of harmonious conflict. It comes from the mark itself--a layered combination of puddle and push that delights in accidental, feathery splats; intentional, but still spontaneous, calligraphic squiggle, and smooth, scraped areas of long, dragged-out solid color. It comes, too, from the way the acrylic and shellac paints resist and compromise each other while drying into an image.

This is painting-as-intuitive-gesture, which fingers the frayed edge of chaos but surprisingly finds order in the outer limits of chance. In the past, Moses has made muddy masses from his crisscrossing drips and puddles of layered color, and some of the larger paintings are underlain with that kind of density. But Moses pumps new air and depth into the color-congested spaces by adding a broad top dressing of opaque but runny white ground, deep, transparent black veils or wide swipes of industrial green. Zips of radiant color and small shards of mirror attached to some canvases further lift the space outward but remarkably never get trashy about it. All of the layering goes on with a freewheeling exuberance of gesture that strongly suggests Pollock, while making yet another case for the beauty of accident and the process of painting.

Yet for all their unfettered happenstance, these paintings are still calculatingly refined. It’s a condition of methodic containment that undoubtedly owes as much to the artist’s long years as a painter as to the somber, restrained palette of blacks, ochres, whites and green. The polite manners play to good effect against the freedom of the process, but it’s a difficult edge nonetheless. It’s hard to guide accident without falling into chaos or clenching into restrictive formula. Thankfully Moses shows no sign of letting either happen, and this new tack continues with assurance.

L.A. Louver, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice. To Aug. 3.

Recalling Illuminated Manuscripts: It’s probably not a coincidence that the tight realism of Wes Christensen’s enigmatic watercolor and gouache drawings at Space Gallery suggest drawings in illuminated manuscripts or elaborately drawn bookplates. He makes images that play games with literature and personal narrative. But if the stories remain hidden or must be puzzled out, it is the glowing color of the small, jewel-like images that is enticing enough to reward the effort. Layer upon layer of built-up color gives the drawings’ surface a delectable, oscillating energy.

Christensen’s brand of literate storytelling probably owes as much to Renaissance art history as to the magic of children’s book illustrations. There is as much Hans Holbein as Maurice Sendak to some of these images. Like Jon Swihart’s egg tempera paintings of quasi-religious parables, Christensen uses thoroughly contemporary scenes endowed with a sense of mysterious import. But the artist’s scenes, springing undoubtedly from an autobiographical source, are often thoroughly mundane and only nip off into philosophy at the last second. In “Reveille in Little Sparta,” a man weeds a thick patch of garden. Only the inscription on a nearby pillar--”Life is short. The tomb is fleeting”--spins the scene into a larger meaning.

Christensen’s meanings, however, are often impossible to decipher--unless you brush up on your French or look up biblical references. Words and text are key to ferreting out implications. Not so with Olga Seem’s “Subliminal Landscapes.” These narrow, vertical panels of double-stacked imagery try to tell it all with pictures using the tradition of landscape painting.

Seem places lovely, delicately colored egg tempera drawings of earth, roots and natural crevices above black and white charcoal drawings of more cracks and grooves in the ground. In general, the charcoal drawings are rougher, struggling hard not to overwhelm the tempera paintings with their dark and light heft. The device of pairing the dissimilar images has the effect of diluting the seductive charms of the color image and tries to suggest a more abstract basis for the work and the pairing. While the contrast of images often seems strictly formal, the overall focus on canyons, blocked flood basins and roots does suggest psychological underpinnings or occasionally budding ecological concerns.

Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd. To Aug. 3 .

Fine-Art Lithographs: In 1960, artist, rebel and intellectual June Wayne set up the Tamarind Lithography Workshop to train master printers and experiment with advanced litho techniques. An artist who had worked with master printers in France, she was appalled by the way the expanding commercial market of offset printing had just about destroyed the hand-pulled lithograph in America. Underwritten by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Wayne opened Tamarind in Los Angeles and dedicated 10 years to overseeing the project that successfully revived fine-art lithographic printing in the United States.

Prints from this decade, drawn from the private collection of Wayne’s master printer Serge Lozingot, show some of the renowned artists that clustered around Wayne’s important revival effort. It’s a list that reads like a who’s who in art, with images by John Altoon, Nathan Oliveira, Joyce Treiman, Emerson Woelffer, and Arthur Secunda. Needless to say the work is varied, but the most adventurous seems to be Wayne’s own prints that continue the artist’s philosophical musings on nature, science and the universe.

Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd. To July 27.