The paintings of Sandeep Mukherjee rarely involve more than a handful of individual elements, flawlessly executed and held in a state of exquisite tension. Early work, made shortly after he completed his MFA at UCLA in 1999, revolved primarily around his own figure floating through space, sometimes among flurries of small, sharp, leaflike ellipses. In the work that hangs around his spacious Pomona studio on the day of my visit — and at Pitzer College’s Nichols Gallery in Claremont in his recent exhibition there — a mountain motif predominates, interspersed with circles and spirals. Within this limited iconographic vocabulary (and limited palette, for that matter: The recent works are primarily black and white), Mukherjee evokes worlds of extraordinary spatial and pictorial complexity. Intricate, sensitive and deeply sensual, it is the sort of work you could live with for years and never get tired of looking at.