Shipping out

If you're looking for color, though, Gil Mares's abstract photographs of cargo freighters in Los Angeles Harbor at Kidder Smith Gallery are saturated with it. Mares putters around in a smaller boat with his 35mm camera and shoots the freighters up close, in all their rusty glory. Then he mounts his photos on aluminum and laminates them: Bright and glossy, they pop off the wall. It would be easy, if you took just a quick glance, to mistake some of these photographs for abstract expressionist paintings. The sides of ships turn out to have the same kinds of heroic gestures and worked-over surface. But there's also an attention to plane, to structure, and to clean lines that gives these a minimalist or cubist clarity. Then, in about half of them, you have the water lapping at the bottom, and suddenly you're grounded in the romance of a seascape.

All that, and color too - the kind of inebriated color that comes when sunlight hits water and intensifies the light. "Lavender Hull" shows -``the turquoise sea throwing a glow of gold reflection onto the pale hull. "Rust Abstract" has a fount of orange rust rising up the side of a black ship, scraped white and lined with curtains of rust, peeling back to show an undercoat of green on the hull.

Mares transforms the mundane and worn into something brilliant. It's a tad too slick; ideally, he would have held on to the rough edges of his subject matter. His intention seems more to seduce his viewer than to appreciate his freighters. He succeeds.