3 Use Abstract Style to Plumb Private Interests

Abstract painting has made a bold, welcome return to the art world in recent years, after being marginalized during a period when issues of narrative and historicism stole the show.

In the current post-postmodern climate, many artists seem to take a fresh approach to such once-scorned values as genuine beauty and spiritual inquiry.

The new wave of abstract painters is faced with the challenge of getting past former role models. Often the new work suggests a quest for the brute psychic energy that propelled the Abstract Expressionists into global prominence. A search for innocence is afoot.

The first step is finding a voice and a turf. Each of the three artists in “Close to the Source,� at Mythos Gallery in Burbank, defines unique personal areas of interest. And, although their art hangs nicely together, there is little overlap between the nature forcefulness of Michael L. Bedoya’s art, the thicket-like layerings of Joel King, and the meditative patterning of Gregory T. Michaelson.

Yet, as abstractionists, they share an abiding faith in the rebirth of art making.

King, who makes the most potent statement in this show, demonstrates an abstract leaning with roots in the real world. In what he calls “recordings of mutability� and with examples of artistic palimpsest, King creates art that gracefully revels in chaos and touches on the evanescence of life. He relies on a vivid palette and deals with layers of image and meaning.

Literal layers of surface, or skin, in the art variously evoke canvas and paint in the fine-art sense, time-eroded plaster and peeling paint jobs. Scrawled atop these surfaces are cryptic bits of graffiti, triggering the reflexive immediacy of language, even when that language is indecipherable.

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By creating images built from a series of layers and references, King taps into the nonlinear flow of consciousness in the modern, info-glutted present, while also presenting a visually electric style.

King takes aim at the essence of, and by extension the underlying absurdity of, cultural communication. Tacitly he supports a more spiritually rooted awareness of life in its multilayered complexity.

Michaelson’s aesthetic is grounded in what he calls, in an artist’s statement, “the transitional stages between organic forms.� This translates visually to vertical pieces filled with recurring, rhythmic patterns.

With a muted, narrow palette of black and white, Michaelson explores the textural possibilities and the sense of logic or continuity through repetition--an idea with Minimalist affinities.

But where Minimalists celebrated pure sensation and a negation of traditional art practices, Michaelson is linked to nature painting, once removed.

Isolated, the organic-looking particles within the compositions are enigmatic, insignificant. Through the artist’s distortion techniques and optical echoes, they take on an unexpected charisma.

Tiny square-format pieces in the gallery’s hallway take on a macrocosmic identity--like small windows on invisible energy forces.

Nature plays a critical role, too, in the restrained mysticism of Bedoya’s paintings. “Solid Fuel� consists of dense, cloudy waves of activity, etched in earth tones with slight glints of gold leaf arising from the murk.

Here there is a suggestion of natural alchemy, of gaseous cogitations yielding to faint bursts of energy and light. The paintings in Bedoya’s “Bathed in Light� series play more like abstract tapestries of crudely drawn, crosshatched lines.

His is an essentially abstract language, but with an appreciation of the sensual qualities in the natural world rather than as a means of angst-venting.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Close to the Source�

* WHEN: Through April 27

* WHERE: Mythos Gallery, 1009 W. Olive Ave., Burbank

* CALL: (818) 843-3686.