This small gallery on Polk Street, like many of its kind, seldom presents formally organized exhibitions but rather shows a fairly diversified range of works in a perpetual and slowly rotating group show. Outstanding in the more recent repertoire here are oil paintings by Masando Kito, a newcomer, and by Jack Carrigg, a gallery regular whose work has taken a new direction since last season. Mr. Carrigg continues to be fascinated with colored vertical stripes, but instead of the thick wavy lines, modulated surfaces and color transitions that characterized his earlier studies, he has abruptly shifted to rigorously methodical essays in the fastidiously opaque, flat surfaces and crisply ruled line of the “hard edge” school. Five of Mr. Carrigg’s paintings currently shown are variations on a schematic formula in which a four-color palette is serially permuted throughout eight vertical bands. The straight lines defined by the boundaries between color-bands are at varying tangents to the perpendicular. Thus, geometrically engendered linear tensions are combined with experiments in color relativity to produce an optically dynamic architectonic totality.

Mr. Kito exhibits a large number of canvases also systematically exploring a uniform syntactical method. A texturally modulated color fabric is developed with fairly heavy impasto in which roughly egg-and-dart shaped, scale-like corrugations are executed with the palette-knife in horizontal bands across the canvas. These studies are for the most part rather subdued, and do not sustain interest as effectively as Mr. Carrigg’s.

—Palmer D. French