Galleries: A fresh directnessin painted wood

Sometimes it's not a bad idea to go home again - especially if you can bring something new to the table. Kevin Finklea's painted wood constructions at Pentimenti Gallery are not a complete return to the wood-based works he made before he took up painting as his main medium in 2000, but they do express the freshness and directness of those earlier works.

How simple are these pieces? They're not as slapdash or rough as Finklea's new creative mantra - "glue it, screw it, and paint it" - would have you believe. Despite the fact that they're constructed from bits of leftover lumber and painted with colors mixed for previous projects, these wall-mounted, multipart geometric works clearly are carefully considered, and the areas of poplar, maple, basswood, cedar, and plywood left intentionally bare have sealed, burnished-looking surfaces. An edge of wood might not line up with another edge, but that's as messy as it gets.

Finklea's statement says he made these works "without attention to memories, narratives, or past histories," but they have highly suggestive, often romantic titles. Looking at Parakeet for Palermo, Group 2, composed of two round shapes, one painted two different colors of blue, and the other two different greens, I immediately thought of the German painter Blinky Palermo, his untimely death in the Maldives, and the intensely colored monochromatic paintings he left behind. Similarly, the vertical construction titled The Embarcadero, 1967 hints at San Francisco's landmark Embarcadero Center, which began construction in that year. When Finklea comes up with a title, he frequently uses it to identify a series of works, adding a numeral at the end to distinguish an individual work. This show features several works from the series "A List of Things We Said We'd Do Tomorrow," for example, and several from "Free Falling Divisions."

Finklea obviously likes to impose limitations on himself and then eke out the most from his limited means. He accomplishes that easily here. Looking at these works and their various iterations, I suspect his future efforts will be increasingly spare.