La Cienega Area

Tim Ebner formerly made 2-by-2-foot house paint color chip panels fitted with Velcro backs for easy rearrangement into suit-the-decor, do-it-yourself grids. They were a conceptualist post-mortem on originality and painting as we traditionally define it. The same ideological current runs through his recent, pristinely elegant “paintings” made from vertical arrangements of brightly colored fiberglass bands. Each work is composed of separate stripes of glossy plastic. One piece alternates blue panels with acidic commercial orange ones, another handsome work bands deep black-blue with jet black.

Like much conceptual work, Ebner’s uses the very systems and vocabulary claimed to be extinct to make his point and, as usual, the point is multileveled, often arcane. The works dazzle us with the clear craft and the innate beauty of well-balanced form that has fueled modernist painting from Constructivism to Brice Marden. The commercial colors and materials lock into the genealogy of Pop art, while the prefabricated, process-conscious simplicity drains all evidence of the artist’s touch, echoing Donald Judd and object art. All these associations end up as Ebner’s point, which is that in Post-Modern art “good form” or “fine design” is not a strictly aesthetic phenomenon but more related to the recycling fancies of taste brokers. (Kuhlenschmidt-Simon Gallery, 9000 Melrose Ave., to June 11.)