VENICE

Ed Moses, one of the originals of L.A. art, promised to go ape in his current two-gallery exhibition and he did so, at least after his fashion. A couple of dozen untitled abstract paintings and works on paper begins with a familiar Moses structure, a field of oblique cross-hatched strokes that reads into depth like a kind of geometric maelstrom, as if we were standing among the girders of an unfinished high-rise and the whole thing suddenly started to spin.

Moses has wandered up many a garden path in his career, suddenly surprising an audience that thought he did little but draw with a series of excellent dripped acrylic paintings and later dismaying them with pointless one-color squares. Yet for all these departures he has cleaved to his oblique weavings both as their master and prisoner.

He is an odd combination of sensibilities. On one hand he is delicate, decorative and craftsmanlike. The quality shows in a couple of works here that look like Scottish plaid rendered by a tasteful European Abstract Expressionist of the ‘50s--Pierre Soulages maybe. What always saved Moses was a kind of riveted intensity that gives the work density through sheer concentration.

Now, probably for the first time, Moses achieves a crazy outgoing passion that puts one in mind of Jackson Pollock. Moses gives his cross-hatchings Dionysian rhythm. Some big paintings look like nests of tapeworm spirits, both repellent and exultant. Works on paper have stained edges and crackled surfaces like Helen Frankenthalers that have, thank God, forgotten their manners.

A gallery of Moses’ cross-hatched paintings in “Individuals” the inaugural show at the Museum of Contemporary Art proved that he has reached safe harbor as a master artist. This batch relieves the lurking fear that he would find no place to go in this majestic haven. Nonsense, he still wants to risk the open sea, sailing out in Rimbaud’s drunken boat to find crashing waterspouts amid the calm seas. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St. to June 20.)