For naïve or semi-initiated Los Angeles art-goers such as myself, a visit to “Soundings,” Sea View’s summer exhibition, might elicit two questions. Who is Bruce Richards? And why does the show’s concurrence with the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art feel uncannily apposite?

Regarding this second question, an object shaped like an open book resting atop a shelf in Sea View’s living room gallery offers a precipitate lead. On the righthand ‘page’ of the sculpture’s gently curving, ivory-white surface, Richards has produced a convincing study of Ruscha’s Adios (1969)—an ultramodern painting that summons its titular expression of farewell from syrupy letters, intermixed with sticky baked beans, all over a hazy golden wash. Further digging reveals that Richards has produced several such book-like objects, all dedicated to artists who’ve influenced his oeuvre. Dubbed “ex-Libris” (a term designating the mark or crest printed on a book’s cover to signify its rightful owner), the series contains homages to contemporaries such as Ruscha, and antecedents including René Magritte and Georgia O’Keefe.

With “Soundings,” Richards betrays a penchant for still lifes of matter in states of flux. In a suite of thematically allied paintings across the exhibition, the artist floats images of flaming tires, bottles, chairs, and candles over neutral color gradients—again invoking Ruscha and his depictions of burning gas stations, chain restaurants, and regional museums. In the manner of Adios, Richards’s paintings are frequently energized by the dialectic they pose between the spontaneous or chaotic events they represent, and the painstaking artifice that underlies their hyperreality. They signal upheaval and a developing chain of events, belying their deadening stillness as well as the artist’s measured, fetishizing touch.

Though the pyrotechnic compositions are rendered in high-contrast colors, the two most evocative paintings in the show—Memory (1981) and Paradise Lost (2023)—are primarily blue, and practically monochrome. Like a mind’s eye recall of a smile, gesture, or vocal signature that settles in without warning, Memory isolates the crenelated ring of a droplet breaking through a level liquid surface. It’s an unreal picture, despite its verisimilitude. Nonetheless, it proffers a form that almost anyone could imagine. Smooth, saccharine—and startlingly, now four decades old—the painting presages the aesthetics of virtual 3D modeling and motion graphics.

For its part, Paradise Lost holds forth a ghostly, contoured study of a princess-ish stiletto, asserting the power of the image—over and above the lyric, novel, or film—to deliver an entire allegory synecdochally, with a single gut punch. Never mind the work’s literary title, or the animated adaptation of Cinderella produced by a local studio 70 years ago. Richards again exploits the metonymic potential of pictures in Light of My Life (2016–18) and the unfortunately titled Recession (2012). The former shows a double-sided candle floating in a vacuum, with both its wicks aflame; the latter a glass of milk, jettisoning its contents as it heads towards the floor. These works are less elegantly composed than Richards’s blue paintings, but I was charmed by their capacity to call to mind discrete idioms from contextless objects with associative sleight of hand. “Don’t cry over spilled milk,” I chanted to myself, turning towards the door.