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Shaped canvases that deviate from a painting's conventional rectangular format became commonplace in 1960s abstract painting. They turn up again in new work by Matthew Carter - albeit in a wholly unexpected, challengingly original way.

At Luis De Jesus, seven large and three small paintings give shaped canvas a slyly expressive function. It is very different from the almost sculptural, non-illustionistic formal motives of  '60s abstraction.

Carter's shapes are made from stretcher bars that are broken, split and cobbled together. Sometimes the painting's otherwise flat surface bends slightly off the wall. He still emphasizes the painting as object, just  as his predecessors did, but irregular shadows now suggest the object's eccentricity.

The paintings employ very thin, loosely woven linen, nearly as loose as cheesecloth. It pulls at points of stress and even begins to shred. Gauze bandages, splints and tourniquets come to mind. Once, abstract painting was seen as art's most profound achievement. Here it performs as a magnificent invalid.

It's also something of a clown. With Carter's use of brightly colored diamond shapes in acrylic, graphite and glitter - shapes that derive from the warping of a rectilinear grid - the circus is invoked as a modern artistic metaphor for life.

In one work, the sophisticated harlequin gets frankly brutish. The specter of Pogo the Clown, alter-ego of serial killer and rapist John Wayne Gacy, hovers in the gauze.

Mortality also lurks in "Acid Bath," perhaps the strongest albeit ricketiest painting. An anamorphic human skull floating near the bottom adds blue and silver glitter to a motif famously - and puzzlingly - employed by Hans Holbein in "The Ambassadors" (1533), his complex meditation on the tumultuous social transformations wrought at Henry VIII's radical court. Carter, in his first solo show with the gallery, deftly brings the modern world's tumult full circle.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp says don't miss this and other shows

of abstract geometric art in Culver City. 

July 31, 2014

For an irreverent exploration of abstraction, check out Matthew Carter in hellequinharlequinclown at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles through August 23.

Some of the diamond patterns are filled with colored glitter and imposed on opaque scrim. 

Stretcher bars are not altogether straight and layers of pattern and loose gestures are superimposed so that you look at and then through the painting just as artists today look at and through the history of art that preceded them.

For more information, go to luisdejesus.com.