“Circuiting,” Bay Area artist Justin Margitich’s solo exhibition at City Limits, a new gallery in Jack London Square, is composed of a collection of new works illustrating a remarkable shift in the artist’s practice after several years working in only large-scale graphite and metal point drawings. This new suite, made on black sandpaper and wood panel ground, were begun what sounds like a serendipitous accident. “Noticing the liminal forms created by sharpening his metalpoint stylus on fine sandpaper,” the gallery writes, “Margitich began using his own incidental marks as beginnings of compositions, painting striations of color on what was previously scrap material.”

Margitich’s previous artworks, entitled as ‘landscapes,’ complex compositions of heavily geometric, multidimensional arrangements exemplify the artist’s high degree of technical skill in perspective, tone, and shading that reveal a fantastic world from the one perhaps inhabited everyday. His new works at City Limits, “Circuit,” where each painting is a number in the series, extracts that frenetic, energetic essence from the landscapes and carefully releases it through abstraction, with gradients of a carefully applied assortment of colors. Much more direct in approach to his previous work, the Circuit series are more of a minimalist but no less powerful avenue to his accomplishments.

Justin Margitich, “Circuiting” will be at City Limits gallery, 300 Jefferson Street through March 15, 2014