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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.

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.

Labeling art is sometimes a useful shorthand form of thinking. But it can also be a sign of flabby thought.

Take that well-worn term “conceptual art.” It has been applied to lots of different kinds of work in recent years, so much so that it becomes of less and less use.

Roman de Salvo’s inventive work is rich with ideas and idiosyncratic media, so this description has been applied to his work often, going back to the early 1990s. And yet the label fits uneasily with his art.

Consider this typical definition of it from Webster’s Dictionary: “an art in which the ideas of the artist are more important than the means used to express them.” Applying it to de Salvo’s art doesn’t quite work.

There is a generally a controlling idea. But he’s also a superb maker of things, whether his material is electrical conduit or whether it’s wood, as in his current exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art.

The works in this show — with its alliterative title, “Split, Splice, Splay, Display” — pick up where he left off with his large-scale permanent public work of 2006, “Nexus Eucalyptus,” installed on the site of the CalTrans District 11 headquarters in Old Town. The construction of the piece was a feat of engineering, in which he turned massive branches into a kind of seamless network resembling a roadway system.

Quint Contemporary Art has had several addresses in the past 30 years, but wherever it has been — downtown, Mission Hills, the Miramar area or La Jolla — the gallery has been a space you just had to visit. My history of seeing shows there spans 24 years; and from the first, I sensed that Mark Quint was the real thing, with his enormous passion for art and artists.

Happily, that intuition proved correct. But who knew that he was going to be able to sustain his space(s) for so long, in a town where collectors of serious contemporary art aren’t exactly plentiful?

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how he has accomplished this. But there are certain qualities that have worked in his favor: a keen eye for artists of vision and substance; the desire to stick with them; a curiosity about new artists; and a personality that appeals to museum professionals, collectors and, yes, critics, too. He was also willing to bring artists from afar for residencies (in partnership with Michael Krichman), which yielded a string of memorable shows.

It’s one of the centuries-old ideas about art that it can mirror the physical world, pleasurably, disturbingly or in other ways. And since its inception in the early 19th century, photography has long been a powerful medium in that respect. But photography, in the art arena, has strayed from this function regularly in the last three decades or so: Creating visual fictions is commonplace. Approaches are myriad and two distinctly different ones are in effect at Quint Contemporary Art in a pair of shows: “Making Space,” featuring Lee Materazzi’s pictures with performing models, and “Every Instance Removed,” Derek Stroup’s photographs that alter the designed landscape we take for granted.

Materazzi, an emerging photographer based in Miami and partly educated in London, makes loopy pictures with a symbolic undercurrent. You might say people are doing pretty dumb things in her pictures: making their heads disappear into the ground, a kitchen drawer or a picture on the wall. As much as we know that their heads haven’t truly evaporated into thin air, in most cases they look like they have. (No, she hasn’t Photoshopped them out of existence in the images; this is straightforward trickery.) So, aside from the smiles or chuckles Materazzi’s photographs may elicit, they play on the degree of willingness we have to delight in visual fantasy. Most are simply playful. And after seeing “Head in Grass” and “Head in Dirt,” you have to think there must be a “head-in-sand” print somewhere in her inventory. But a couple of other images convey a visual and emotional tension: “Head in Utensil Drawer,” with its sharp objects, and “Storage Container,” in which a person is crammed into a plastic canister in the bottom of a closet. There is an art historical pedigree to these pictures too, in dada, fluxus and conceptual art. But you don’t need to think about that to be amused by them. It’s hard to decide whether Materazzi is simply a clever artist or something more than that, based on this show. But I’m intrigued enough to want to see more of her work.