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Kelsey Brookes intricately assembles large iconlink images from countless minute paintings of beings and things that maybe related to the central subject or may not. Inside the form of a trumpeting elephant’s head or a dancing female figure, the viewer may come upon cartoonish creatures with boxy mouths and big ears, snippets of text, eyeballs with links to Buddhist and Hindu iconography, and a wide assortment of other curiosities. The overall effect is pleasingly maximalist.

Brookes’s technique suggests affinities with Ryan McGinness and Shepard Fairey. And like those artists, Brookes is a crossover figure. Straddling the worlds of graphic design and art, he has attracted a fan base from the surf and skate cultures for his illustration work. But this exhibition, “Bigger, Brighter, Bolder,” with 12 large paintings and an assortment of tiny ones, demonstrated that Brookes isn’t content simply to adapt his established style to canvas. The imagery here was looser, more painterly and the array of symbolic forms more expansive.

Robert Irwin’s new work at La Jolla’s Quint Contemporary Art — his first show in a commercial gallery space on the West Coast in three decades — consists mainly of fluorescent light tubes. But it’s important to know that it’s not about the lights.

Sound like a contradiction? On the surface, yes. But not if we take into account the dramatic evolution of Irwin’s art since the 1960s — a body of work that has made him one of the major artists of our time.

Irwin, 81, has worked with an impressive array of media. There are the painted and shaped acrylic surfaces of his ethereal, wall-mounted discs of the late 1960s. Or, the tinted fence he employed in works like “Two Running Violet V-Forms” for UCSD’s Stuart Collection in 1981. Then, there is the vast array of plant life in what is arguably his most famous work for a public place: the Getty Garden in Los Angeles.

No one seems more tickled than Robert Irwin himself by where the artist, at 81, has landed. “It’s fairly humorous,” he says with a smile. Whatever the unsavory circumstances, “I come up smelling like a rose. I like what I’m doing.”

In his customary jeans and baseball cap, he sits among his newly installed work at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, not exactly smug but clearly satisfied. This is his first commercial gallery show in California in 30 years, the result of several significant shifts in his working process. He resisted every one of them, but each ended up delivering unexpected opportunities. They’ve left him chuckling — surprised and grateful.

His new fluorescent tube sculptures relate to other work he’s made over the decades, but they sprang most directly out of an extensive exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s two newly built downtown locations in 2007-08. Director Hugh Davies organized the show, which traced Irwin’s evolution from Abstract Expressionist painter to creator of room-sized environments defined by light, space and color.

The exhibition turned out to be a catalyst for Irwin. “For a lot of artists, having a retrospective kind of freezes them,” Davies says. “With Bob it had the opposite effect. It really energized him.”

Maximum minimalism: Icelandic artist Gudmundsson’s striking works at Quint, his first solo exhibition, are striking

By Robert L. Pincus, UNION-TRIBUNE ART CRITIC / BOOKS EDITOR

“I am trying to work within the field of tension that exists between nothing and something.”

— Kristjan Gudmundsson

Perhaps you have never asked yourself: Is there a sophisticated art scene in Iceland? And it would be understandable if you didn’t think there was, since its population is small and it’s remote from art centers like New York or Berlin.

The answer, though, is yes — and, in fact, Kristjan Gudmundsson, a leading Icelandic artist, has exhibited in Berlin, among other places. But it’s unlikely he would have exhibited in San Diego, if not for the interest that Mark Quint has taken in some of the work being made there.

Energy is a kind of tangible intangible in painting. You know it when you feel it.

It’s as crucial to a minimal work, like a Robert Ryman white painting, as to a maximal one, such as a Ryan McGinness image filled with pictographic images and decorative motifs. The manifestations of energy in art are many — from the way a surface shimmers to the way forms relate to one another to the way paint covers a canvas. Art historian B.H. Friedman’s called his biography of Jackson Pollock “Energy Made Visible” for good reason.

So, when an artist’s work seems to possess this ingredient, attention should be paid. And the paintings in San Diego artist Kelsey Brookes’ new exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art fit the bill. “Bigger, Brighter, Bolder” is its title, which seems about right.

La Jolla The instructional drumbeat of this show’s title—“Split, Splice, Splay, Display”—characterizes well the transparency and humor of Roman de Salvo’s best work. It describes in the most abbreviated manner the steps he takes to transform raw material (in this case, wood) into finished sculpture, and delivers the alliterative terms with a showman’s wink. De Salvo has a bit of the carnival barker’s performative flair (“It slices, it dices . . . ”) in addition to the patience and diligence of a fine craftsman.

For each of the six new pieces in this show (all 2008 or ’09), he split and segmented tree branches, recombining them into wall-mounted sections of tracery. The cut sides of the wood face out, and have been sanded so they read as smooth, continuous planes. That continuity is a coy illusion, since the spline joints (slender strips of wood inserted and glued into grooves cut into the ends of both joined pieces) that connect the sections are fully visible, and neither the grain patterns nor the width of the segments matches up precisely. De Salvo flaunts the artifice of his constructions while teasing organic-looking patterns from them. In Filter, Chinese elm branches are made to look like the veins of a giant (36-by-86-inch) double-stemmed leaf. In Delta Tissue, the slim lines of wood define a cluster of irregular rounded shapes suggestive of a cellular network or the residue of an agglomeration of bubbles.