LA CIENEGA AREA

Sometimes it’s hard to know if artists absorb trends or trends absorb artists. On its face, Sol LeWitt’s art appears to stick admirably to its Minimalist guns against the onslaught of Neo-Expressionism. His mural-style wall drawings are still rigorously rational variations on a few geometric forms (and still executed by assistants).

There is “Symmetrical Pyramid” right next to “Asymmetrical Pyramid.” Back gallery walls are covered with “Three Colors and All Their Combinations (Ink Washes) Seven Parts.” Intervening space is given over to 10 vertical sculptures in LeWitt’s trademark-white, painted wood modular cube grids.

So there you are: a modern classicist doing his pristine thing.

Not quite. Sculpture ranges from knee high to man tall. Something about its scale makes it feel less like theoretical exercise and more like architectural model. Suddenly it’s allusively realistic, like Joel Shapiro’s work, echoing all those ever-controversial megabuildings that threaten to turn Manhattan’s surface streets into sunless labyrinths.

The wall drawings, scrubbier and more textured than those of yore, seem prepared to serve as cave-flavored “tough” decor in a high-tech watering place where brilliantined loungers discuss the effects of the various hues: “I don’t like the yellow. It makes me afraid I am going to cheer up. The brown is nice. It has a nice comfortable familiar quality of indigestion.”

This is a subtle but inescapable tilt in LeWitt’s work. You almost hope he put it there on purpose. Otherwise it looks like Post-Modernism has a life of its own and will devour us all, willing or no. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to May 25.)