La Cienega

Guy Williams has negotiated a smooth transit into the late ‘80s with work that adds subtle pleasures to the big-scale immediacy of vivid color and three-dimensional block letters. The subtleties are contained in the stop-and-start rhythms of a scribble pattern that disports itself on pieced and layered rectangular sheets of paper all painted a single hue. Here and there, the scribbles--differently styled in each piece--become magnified versions of themselves or segue from seamless, all-over patterning to subtle discontinuities.

Color and the “signature” of the jumping line create the distinctive feel of each piece. A hefty, sculptural letter H looms out of “Dante and the Lobster,” a mass of loopy hot pink tangles on a black ground. “Watt’s Knot,” is cerebral pale yellow blitzed with a spacious thin red scrawl and tidy rows of three-dimensional T’s. In “Pensum,” the gold-on-black markings look rather like calligraphy and the colony of projecting E’s sitting on vertical strips of the patterned paper are vaguely reminiscent of the ornamental border treatment of Chinese scroll paintings. The type of sober decorativeness underlining all this is in keeping with Williams’ long-term fascination with the aphoristic qualities of elegant line. (Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., to Dec. 31.)