Light Opera: Robert Greene.

'CLEAN" IS HOW ROBERT GREENE describes a lot of the work he likes these days. "I wanted to immerse myself in the cleanness and brightness of LA," says Greene, who moved here from New York after five and a half years in Amsterdam. "My whole mind was in European painting, but I wanted to get back to this industrial design thing." (That's also clean.) In his mind, the light and look of LA are equated with the process and vernacular of abstraction. An anonymous photo of a red Flair Cleaners sign [it appears on this issue's table of contents] has a "shininess" to it that for Greene "is what it's all about."

When asked to organize a "show" for these pages, the painter, whose work has moved from quirky figurative idylls to a crisper, Moderne abstraction, took to the idea immediately, perhaps because he's been doing precisely this sort of thing--arranging other artists' images--on his studio wall for years. "I'll buy a book that's really expensive for just one image," Greene remarked. "There's an excitement to ripping it out and putting it up. I love seeing an Al Held next to, say, the abstract brightness of an Alexander Girard fabric design." Of Girard, Greene says, "I'm so inspired by the purity and joy of his colors, the greens and tobaccos. I think, How can I do that as a painting?" Similarly, he admires Russ Meyer's '60s black-and-white films for "their great look and sophisticated stills," which remind him of Wong Kar-wai's recent In the Mood for Love. As for other types of immaculate girlie imagery, he says of the Swiss artist Carol Bove's watercolor: "I go for that quality of a whisper, that Ingres-esque dr awing, and that '60s Playboy thing."

Images from Iceland, Brazil, Mali, and Italy also excite Greene's appetite for a new cleanliness. Lucio Fontana's "bone-colored" abstraction has a quality of "flesh" that Greene finds "echoed in the hair color of the Bove." For Greene, Niemeyer's Niteroi Museum is a "spectacular architectural experience. There is such poetry and otherworldliness in that modern form and its integration with the landscape." (It also rhymes with the cantilever in the Dorazio.) Along similar lines, Greene values Malick Sidibe's photographs for "their monumental sculptural form." (In fact, Sidibe also makes polychrome life-size sculptures of his subjects.) Olafur Eliasson's Icelandic ice sculpture is prized, not for its location ("it could be in Florida, for all I care") but as "an image of a simple and monumental form in nature." Thus do North and South, bodies and landscapes make dizzying roundabouts in Greene's breath-of-fresh-air worldview.

For this occasional feature, Artforum invites artists to curate an "exhibition" in our pages.

ROBERT GREENE has exhibited his paintings regularly at Robert Miller Gallery in New York for over fifteen years. The subject of a 1996 solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he lived for a time in the '90s, Greene is currently based in Los Angeles. Formerly a painter of oddly disquieting arcadian landscapes, Greene calls his more recent, abstract works "reductive, with a modernist architectural feel to them." For this month's Artists Curate, Greene lifts a dozen-plus images from the ever-evolving "exhibition" pinned to his studio walls.