At least part of the impact of Karen Carson’s new paintings is attributable to their unfamiliarity. In her elliptical oil on canvas pieces and the smaller water-based paintings on paper Carson establishes a series of vortices—configurations of stacked, jagged, overlapping planes of variously colored arcs, ziggurats, L-shapes, triangles, and odd geometric fragments. These paintings are radically different both from her previous work (especially the starkly rendered, illusionistic drawings of objects for which she is best known) and from that of any other abstract painter in town. In the turn away

Origami comes to mind amidst Christopher Georgesco’s new work, most of it smallish maquettes for large steel sculptures. In fact, origami could serve as a metaphor for the undeniably logical, surprisingly poetic way his forms have grown from one another in his work of the past five years. Georgesco’s earliest pieces, narrow, cast concrete totems about 10 feet high, were elegantly shaped so that each side read in planar counterpart to the other three. These obelisklike pieces subsequently developed into a series of concrete and steel tripods. A single profile of one of the earlier horizontal

In the other-than-pejorative meanings of regionalism there must be an entry for indigenous style. Whenever a place is sufficiently nurturing or provocative to engender a look, technical or iconographic, among a number of resident artists what is shared and why should be considered. Los Angeles and its environs seem to foster experimentation with perceptual situations, most of them about light, often sunlight, as is evident in the work of such locals as Bob Irwin, Eric Orr, Maria Nordman, and Jim Turrell, all of them well known. Less well known, but at work in an area congruent with this group,

Allegorical syllogisms are the stuff of Mike Kelley’s performances, and a pretense to logic underlies everything he does. Kelley presented three of his latest skits in a recent performance, while a show about poltergeists he had made collaboratively with David Askevold was on view. The simplest of the three pieces, My Space, showed Kelley at his maniacal, cogent best. In it he inveighs against plants since “if my behavior can affect plants/plants can influence my behavior.” The diatribe is punctuated by Kelley’s wild beating of a drum as he circles an unsuspecting succulent. Even as he insists

If Seurat’s dictum that painting is “the art of hollowing out a surface” were true, then Nicholas Africano’s work wouldn’t qualify. Africano paints figures in literal bas-relief, awkward, lumpish characters built up of painted wax on a monochromatic field. The High Wire, a group of four new paintings that are almost identical in composition, presents a figure in mid-stride, balancing precariously on a thin tightrope as he journeys across the gray-blue canvas.

Africano was at one time a writer of short, nondiscursive prose that attempted to create direct, immediate images with words. Slowly, he

Guy De Cointet weaves abstraction and language together in deliberately theatrical performances that can only be described as elegant. American abstract art in the early 20th century was, in the critical view championed by Willard Huntington Wright, adamant in its rejection of the “extraneous” element of literature in art. De Cointet’s Tell Me is, in his words, “a performance about language and abstraction, and how they are perceived by the mind and the senses.” Monologue, dialogue, sign language, song, and, if you’ll excuse the expression, body language are played off abstract forms, objects,