FRANCESCA PASTINE is a San Francisco Artist whose work seems Southern California: L.A. cool, not S.F. funk; 20th century L.A., not 19th Century S.F.  Her paintings, now showing in the cramped back hallway at James Harris Gallery, start with a smooth sheet of industrial stainless steel, its edges folded over into smooth, rounded edges.  She paints directly onto the metal, without gesso, undercoat, or any other preparation.  Really looking at the surface of this material is revelatory for anyone who, for reasons of inebriation or just mental tiredness, has found himself contemplating the top of a garbage can would testify.  Gray, silver, or black in spots-- depending on lighting and variations in the surface-- the steel carries a cool glow with glimmering, jewel-like highlights.  Respecting her materials,  Pastine paints only lightly on this surface, leaving much of it exposed.

Pastine's painting hand is loose yet tidy, covering the sheet with repeated forms which range from thin, wavering lines to small, stenciled blots that resemble potato prints.  There are links with mid-century art, from the minimalist grid loosely laid over one of Silent Treatment's (1999) two panels to the abstract, expressionist influenced composition of a 1998 untitled work--but I wouldn't make a simple equation out of this fact.  Pastine's work draws as much from the vernacular culture of post-war America as from its art specifically, Kustom Kulture auto pinstriping, and kitchen and bathrooms.

The kitchens and the bathrooms are the easiest to tease out.  Pastine's colors tend toward pale pink, avocado green, sky blue and bright yellow--all colors associated with '60s refrigerators, ovens, sinks and tiles.  Her forms are similarly domestic: little heart shapes arranged in flower-petal-like  groups of five in Silent Treatment and Flutter (1998), a budding tree branch form in Untitled (1996), and a curving, single line shape in the left panel of Untitled (1998) that resembles both a loose rubber band (seen as a line), and the sandpapery, flower-shaped stick-ons that keep you from slipping and bonking your head in the tub (seen as a solid).

The pinstriping reference is probably unintentional, but it's there in the sleek, thin line of her brush,  in the curves of that line, in the shininess of her metal support.  But it's a loose link: Pinstripers tend to take simple shapes of images and work them into baroque, vibrating, barely readable forms composed of many curving, crossing lines, while Pastine's complexity comes from overlapping simple shapes.  it's two different sorts of blur.  The common ground is found in a much larger tradition of decorative arts--call it "more is more."  Pure description and plainness are enemies of this tradition, which loves detail and richness.

Pastines's diptychs tend to contrast feminine and masculine forms.  The aforementioned Silent Treatment has the little heart shapes next to a steel sheet covered in a grid of spindly lines, like country home stencil-shapes matched up with graph paper.  But Pastine's grid is not strict: formed of loose, slightly wavering lines, it brings to mind Agnes Martin's delicate, human--and feminine--minimalist drawings.  Pastine's positioning is remarkable, poised at the intersection of two large art trends: feminized minimalism with no taste of  of brutal machismo, and minimalism which refers to the world outside of the hermetic discourse of art.

Which should lead me out of the art and into that world, I suppose, but it doesn't.  This is not disappointing to me, though.  Pastine's real-world references are important to her art, but it's less fun to think about those connections than it is to simply revel in the beauty of the work.