David Fobes’s colorful compositions avoid painting altogether in his exhibition called Code-O-Chromes currently at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla. Fobes lectures on the subjects of color and design at San Diego State University, and his works employ various academic concepts of twentieth-century color theory.

The exhibit invokes the quaint professorial notion that “painting is dead.” He justifies his position by creating compositions that could be mistaken for college textbook illustrations demonstrating color phenomena such as color assimilation, color boundary vibration, and illusions of luminosity. Each of these types of color phenomena themselves can be visually arresting, but Fobes reinforces his death of painting perspective by making his images out of cloth and vinyl adhesive tapes normally used in the building and manufacturing industries instead of paint. He also applies his tape with extreme precision. Precisely applied, the theoretical color designs made of industrial adhesive tapes make Fobes’s imagery reek with mechanistic deadness. Perhaps Fobes’s formula is too successful.

Many historical artists such as Piet Mondrian, Frank Stella, or Al Held have made impeccable artworks by either using precise craft or industrial materials. Although, when scrutinizing up close the precise painted lines in an artwork by Mondrian the viewer can see slight imperfections betraying that the master painted it all by hand using only a brush and knife. Stella used masking tape to create his early minimal black stripe paintings but applied the tape to a textured canvas that would let the paint defectively seep under the tape to prevent it from being deadly perfect. The late Al Held made paintings that look smooth and perfect when reproduced in a book but are far from being so when one looks at the real objects because a viewer can see many sanding and grinding marks in the actual painted surface. These imperfections and defects keep an artwork alive or create drama.

A viewer can stare at one of Fobes’s exacting artworks and be amazed that there are so many different hues of adhesive tape in the industrial marketplace—rather than be amazed at the artwork on which the viewer is staring. Therein is the real problem with many of the artworks in Code-O-Chromes exhibition. The material Fobes uses to make his work tends to become more important than his actual art.

A recent series of elegant works each entitled “Liquid Geometry” feature a twisting rectangular prism on striped backgrounds. The prisms are either rendered as schematic lines or defined in contrasting values of stripes. Much of the “Liquid Geometry” imagery is visually fatiguing due to his use of harshly brutal color combinations.

Many works from the series use fluorescent greens, reds, and yellow on highly saturated Op-Art color grounds, but Fobes is at his best in his “Liquid Geometry #3” (2011) when he uses different chromatic grays to render the twisting prisms on a similar value background of blue and red stripes. The prism is created from a medium value chromatic gray set against both light gray stripes and dark gray stripes that contextually appear to make the medium gray stripes change in both value and hue. This phenomenon in color theory is known as the Bezold effect.

A two panel work, entitled “The New Normal” (2011), also features two of the twisting prisms in a retro-haze of hip and cool as the prisms are surrounded by duct-tape gray mid-century modern starburst shapes. Unfortunately, the diptych’s elegant twisted prisms make the starburst shapes look anemically out of date like 1970s symmography nail and string art rather than 1950s mid-century cool.

An elegant work hidden away in the library’s book stacks is “No Title Yet” (2009). It is a feast of squares in different lighter hues set in a dark field of dark, low key colors. It is a glorious example of the color theory known as the illusion of luminosity.

A conceptually interesting triptych is based on a poem about the death of painting. Fobes translated the elegy’s words into a pattern of black and white barcode symbols and titled the artwork “Embedded” (2011). The three-panel artwork is a dazzling field of multiple black and white bar codes but loses its visual rhythm due to the odd size variation of the different barcodes. The image appears awkward and predictable more than visually poetic.

If you appreciate eye scorching color combinations or are a devotee of color theory phenomena, then there is much to appreciate in Code-O-Chromes. If you appreciate the hand of the artist and the real soul of an artwork, then after viewing David Fobes’s compositions you may leave the exhibition despondent over his sticky-tape mumification of painting.