La Cienega Area

Enshrined among a tiny handful of significant European artists of the ‘50s, Lucio Fontana was the Slasher, cutting and stabbing canvases to reveal a stagy darkness of black gauze. His minimal approach in works from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s--all titled “concetto spaziale” (spatial concept) and identified with numbers and letters--holds up surprisingly well today, albeit with a certain retro aura.

The Sputnik era flavors “58 B 6,” a black canvas poked with irregular holes forming two orbit-like concentric rings, and especially “65 TE 48”: a canvas blackness pierced by holes clustered like shooting stars, which is partially covered by a sheet of copper cut out in the shape of an astronaut’s helmet and a stylized aurora borealis.

Canvas color and the size, degree of raggedness and placement of the punctures determines the mood of each piece. A small strawberry-pink canvas with gouged-in scribbles and various-sized rips has a dotty, cheerful air. Vertical stabs on a yellow canvas form three undulating lines like grasses in a field. On an austere black canvas touched with gray, two long gashes bow out in stiff, sculptural arcs.

Fontana began his career as a sculptor--he was middle-aged by the time he discovered the power of holes and, finally, cuts--but the sculptures in this show lack the tension and immediacy of the paintings. If the action of premeditatedly slashing a canvas has the allure of an action at once desperate and perfect, the imprinting of slashes and “skid marks” on a colony of flat-surfaced bronze chunks mounted on the wall registers as cold and tame. (Fiorella Urbinati Gallery, 8818 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 30.)