The paintings sometimes look like amplified studies of cellular electric activity. Others, the "veils" and "unfurleds," are perfect renderings of bright bars of color, snuggling together like gooey strips of psychadelic chewing gum. It's the work of Morris Louis, a lesser known American artist from the abstract expressionist movement. The first major survey of his work is currently at the downtown location of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Louis worked on unprimed canvases, staining them with carefully guided rivulets of thinned acrylic paint and creating, as the museum argues, abstract paintings the likes of which had never before been seen. Because he worked mostly in Washington, D.C. (which is to say, not New York), he is not a recognizable name in the postwar American period. It is a fine survey.
The downtown space also has an installation by Brazilian Ernesto Neto, known for his freaky "membrane" pieces. For MCASD, Neto was commissioned to make a room of gob-like fabric pouches weighed down from the ceiling with aromatic spices. You walk in and feel as though you're in a cathedral designed for ecstatic Smurfs -- on mushrooms.
* Pictured above is Morris' Alpha-Phi, 1961.