Larry Bell's new installation of 245 paintings on paper ranks among the year's best gallery shows. It's terrific to see an artist of Bell's stature and talent at the top of his game, pushing beyond the tried-and-true to find new ways to do what he's always done best; slow down viewers in order to allow their surroundings to reveal themselves more fully than usual.

Two rows of 10-inch-squari abstractions wrap around the walls of Kiyo Higashi Gallery. To stand back and take in the whole is to be struck by how each piece interacts with those around it, forming a critical rhythm of expansion and contraction.

But the best way to see Bell's iridescent "Fractions" is to move in close and focus on a single work. To do so Is to feel as if you've fallen into a microscopic cosmos. So many visual incidents are packed into every square inch of each multilayered piece that it's easy to target its actual dimensions and get lost following tiny swirls of color and miniature constellations formed by mysteriously suspended flakes of pigment.

Bell's abstract images exert a seemingly magnetic pull on peripheral vision. While one work absorbs your attention, others tug at your eyes, irresistibly drawing you on to new exploration. The installation Is more of an event or series of experiences than a static arrangement of objects.

Something like synergy is generated by Bell's art. In contrast to most shows with so many works, your interest actually builds, your level of engagement rises each of the "Fractions" seems more beautiful than the last.

Bell's fluid pieces evoke Ed Moses' Zen-Inspired works, in which the ease of a gesture intensifies its impact, rather than dimiinishing it. They also recall John M. Miller's riveting paintings, which are at once utterly singular and elements of multi-part installations.

To create his "Fractions," Bell cut discarded earlier works into bits and used them to make new compositions. Many of the discarded pieces contained chemically treated surfaces. When he subjected each "Fraction" to the high temperatures of a lamination press, It caused layers to melt and flow, sometimes blending and other times sitting atop one another like oil on water.

Titled "Fraction of the Fractions," his joyful show is merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the past three years Bell has made more than 7,000 of the 10,000 recycled collages he plans for the series. It no longer makes sense to distinguish between parts and wholes, because each is so effortlessly transformed into the other.