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Non-Angeleno readers may not have heard of Charles Garabedian, whose biggest East Coast splash was arguably made as part of Marcia Tucker's landmark 1978 "Bad" painting exhibit at the New Museum. Reverse provincialism we're used to, but the embarrassing thing about Garabedian's current five-decade retrospective isn't that it won't be traveling to MoMA — your loss, toots! — it's that it won't be traveling to MOCA. Or LACMA. Or the Hammer. I don't often weigh in on museum politics, because, frankly, I don't give a shit — but, please, come on. I don't know a single painter in L.A. that doesn't worship at the altar of Chaz, and it takes Julie Joyce at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to make this happen? Prophets without honor, and all that — but couldn't we skim a little off Jeff Koons's plastic surgery fund?

Good on Julie, though, who recently landed upcoast after a decade or so at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Gallery as one of the city's very interesting cloud of small institutional curators who've taken up the slack of the major museums' regrettable interpretation of internationalism. Because Garabedian is a talent of international stature — say along the lines of Guston-if-he'd-lived — and anyone interested in the possibility of painting as a living practice should see this show. The Guston parallel is pretty apt — Guston actually grew up in L.A. (where he and Jackson Pollock were kicked out of Manual Arts High for publishing a communist zine!) and he was obviously looking at a lot of the same art as Garabedian — just ten years earlier. Their work trembles on the same threshold between figuration and abstraction, and their spatial constructions are the same mix-up of the serene geometrics of Piero della Francesca and the cascading contents of Fibber McGee's closet (look it up on Wikipedia, you whippersnappers!).

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Known primarily for his deceptively awkward figuration, Garabedian's greatest strengths — even taking into account his experimental narrative accomplishments — lie in his astonishing and hard-won formal chops. Grappling elegantly with such syntactical elements as scale, surface, color, line, composition, materials, and illusionistic forms and spaces — with a visual vocabulary as historically informed as it is idiosyncratic — his work can literally take your breath away. In the old-school museum architecture of SBMOA, the monumental "September Song" (2001-2004) and "The Spring For Which I Longed" (2001-2003) seem even more humongous (300+ square feet) than they did when originally shown at the ginormous-enough LA Louver Gallery in Venice.

The gallery these two behemoths dominate covers the most hyperoxygenated period of Garabedian's oeuvre; at the age of 70, the artist hit his prime, propagating a sequence of virtuosic paintings that integrated and transcended his illustrational/decorative impulses in a mythologically charged improvisational extravaganza. Paintings like "Calendar" (1995) and "Garden" (2001) juggle sensual and pictographic modes of abstraction that honor the ancestors while raising the dead: Exquisite Fauvist brushwork bursting crackpot/neo-classical linearity from within, unleashing a tsunami of beautiful semiotic ruins.

"Charles Garabedian: A Retrospective" wisely gives this period room to breathe, while devoting ample space to observe the artist getting up to speed over the first decade or so of activity — a period of experimentation with oddball materials like resins and something called Flo-Plaque, flirtation with Pop's mass-media derived figurations, and deliberate undermining of much of picture-making's traditional vocabulary — willfully cramming a large image of a television screen into an urban landscape, rendering its other elements into a decorative border ("Daytime TV," 1966), for example. It's towards the end of this period — in the early '70s — that Garabedian makes peace with the rectangle and begins working with acrylic paints, resulting in his otherworldly "Henry Inn" series of abstractions and equally improbable figurative work like "Chinese Mr. Hyde" (1975).

For many, Garabedian's '80s work is Garabedian — the saturated, stripped-down beach scenes of his "Prehistoric Figure" series, the beginning of his interest in classical literature, from which his lengthy engagement with "The Iliad" emerged. But the same period saw Garabedian regularly cutting loose with improvisation, free-associative extravaganzas like "In Anticipation, The Watchers" (1985-88) that put the artist's mad skills in the service of a less conventionally structured reality, where fragments of textiles and landscapes collide with visual quotations from outsider art and classical antiquities in a shifting post-cubist planar dreamspace.

It's these works — and there are examples from all points in his career — where Garabedian's tremendous improvisational streak is allowed free rein: Woodgrain and brickwork morph into one another, then into something else, and then some bug-eyed entity from an Armenian illustrated manuscript pops out from behind a passage of unrepentant painterly abstraction which coalesces into the side of an urn or something. It's painting that achieves the condition of a documentary record of the intuitive creative process — what the Abstract Expressionists strived for — but does so with a timeless resignation to the limitations and possibilities of material sensuality and The Image.