Centuries ago, describing heaven - or skyward approaches to it, anyway - fell within the competence expected of the ambitious European religious painter. But even before "God's Funeral," as Thomas Hardy tagged the Victorian age collapse of faith, heaven had withdrawn from painting's power to evoke it.
Apparently Los Angeles painter Ed Moses decided to give it a shot anyway in the 2007 series sampled under Brian Gross' auspices in the lobby at One Post Street.
Like many painters in their 80s, Moses undoubtedly has given some thought to the aftermath of his life and the afterlife of his work.
Wordless thoughts of this order converge in a thinly washed Moses painting such as "Alping" (2007), which presents a perfect transfiguration of substance into style: perhaps as deep an idea of heavenly deliverance as an L.A. - or any 21st century American - vantage point permits.
Only an artist with Moses' experience at moving paint around could get profound feeling from a canvas as relaxed and loopily decorative as this one.
Translucent blues and pinks swirl from edge to edge, buoyed optically by a touch of iridescence. (Moses is famously secretive about his exact recipes and techniques.) Abstract painting's capacity to make us forget gravity figures here as the equivalent to ascent.
In a kind of dialectical touch, Moses has flecked his pictures with black blotches, to remind us where we stand.
The paintings' suavity may come almost too easily to Moses after so many decades, but the creative restlessness and self-challenge at the heart of them will always be rare.
Lindsey White at BRX: Comic conceptual art continues to thrive in the Bay Area, still unbeknownst to a wide public. See Lindsey White's show at Baer Ridgway Exhibitions.
White's ideas may appear slight, but they know their pedigree. Her "Accidents Happen" (2010) takes the form of a double-hung window on stilts with identical jagged holes broken in its upper and lower sash panes. An unfurled black shade behind the pedestaled window helps us see this.
The matching breaks are anything but accidental. Ditto her allusion to two works by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), champion of chance in aesthetics: "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)" (1915-23) and "Fresh Widow" (1920), a pair of scaled-down French doors, their panes backed with black leather.
After "The Large Glass," a painting on glass whose support resembles a double-hung window, sustained fractures during shipping, Duchamp claimed them as features of the work's "definitively unfinished" state.
White's photograph "Spilled Milk" (2010) also turns a proverbial accident into bait for paranoid vision. The white contents of two tipped-over black glasses run together to form a sort of Rorschach blot.
Like "Accidents Happen," "Spilled Milk" evokes childhood mishaps and remorse and the popular Freudian notion that unconscious motives underlie manifest accidents - and artworks.
Another photograph, "Light Squared" (2010), may intend an echo of Einstein's most famous equation. It takes a moment to discern in the image sunlight falling on a square of bare concrete, framed in deep shadow by architecture or somehow otherwise masked by White.
She may allude here to the West Coast lineage of "light and space" art or even to a famous work of Lawrence Weiner: a square cut from a broadloom carpet.
Luggage Store "Rehistoricizing": Regard "Rehistoricizing Abstract Expressionism in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1950s-1960s" at the Luggage Store as a sketch for the exhibition it purports to be.
Fuzzy on factual details and time frame, it nevertheless assembles works not easy to see together anywhere else: drawings by Jay DeFeo, a knockout 1961 painting by the recently deceased Deborah Remington, an early work by Cornelia Schulz, an outstanding recent one by Jose Ramon Lerma and much else.
The show, organized by Carlos Villa, argues that the Bay Area in the mid-20th century was far more hospitable than other American art centers to creative voices not welcomed widely until the turn of the 21st.
Ed Moses: Airborne: Paintings. Through Sept. 10. One Post St., S.F. (415) 788-1050. www.briangrossfineart.com.
Lindsey White: Equivalent Exposure: Photographs, sculpture and video. Through July 17. Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, 172 Minna St., S.F. (415) 777-1366. www.baerridgway.com.
Rehistoricizing Abstract Expressionism in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1950s-1960s: Paintings, drawings and sculpture. Through July 31. The Luggage Store, 1007 Market St., S.F. (415) 255-5971. www.luggagestoregallery.org.
