LA CIENEGA AREA

Swedish-born Eva Holmstrom makes her local solo debut with a series of oil pastels on paper that explore mood and space through a subtle combination of atmospheric chiaroscuro and formal geometry.

Through a dense buildup of hatched lines in muted colors and vivid light-dark contrasts, Holstrom delineates various geometric forms in order to explore both shifting planar perspective and suggested three-dimensionality. The results are much like the effects of peripheral vision or attempts to see objects in the diffused light of deep oceans, where images drift in and out in an ambiguous merger of positive and negative space.

This mysterious fusion of dark romanticism and detached abstraction has the makings of an interesting premise, but Holstrom limits the work to a mere formal exercise, working various permutations through their structural paces instead of pushing her visual vocabulary into truly challenging areas.

This formal diffidence is also the weakness of Brock Klein’s otherwise eloquent mixed-media paintings. Recently returned from a three-year sojourn to Japan where he studied traditional and modern calligraphy, Klein has incorporated the flowing gesture of the Oriental brush stroke into an essentially Western, abstract context, in which line and color field play off each other in a structural and spatial dialectic.

Combining collaged rice paper with broad washes of color, Klein composes each work using an Oriental scroll motif of central image surrounded by a complex border, thus creating an innate push-pull between interior and exterior focus. Klein expands these contradictions to the calligraphy, confusing figurative and literary allusions in a sort of gestural pastiche.

The work’s weakness lies in its structural repetitiousness and tendency toward the decorative, subsuming real aesthetic tension within an overall context that ultimately boils down to a contrived merger of East and West. (Ruth Bachofner, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to June 21.)