LA CIENEGA AREA

“Merry Xmas Happy New Year to Bob Jan 1973” reads the inscription on Joan Brown’s ragged wash drawing of a nude wearing black gloves frosted with watery white squiggles. If Bob grew sufficiently tired of the piece to consign it to a gallery, it’s hard to blame him. In a show of figurative works by seven artists in different stages of their careers, Brown is more flatteringly represented by “Girl With Green Negligee” of 1972, one of the artist’s idiosyncratic, queenly-yet-vulnerable images of women. Wearing a swiftly brushed hint of a gown, the nude sits on a couch covered with a lurid patchwork throw and backed by a view of enormous palm trees snaking against a maroon sky.

Robert Colescott’s mordantly outrageous stereotypes of blacks enliven “Stroll Through the Neighborhood,” a painting packed with loudly dressed bodies, brightly colored lips and enough varieties of mayhem to set the white suburban heart aquiver. But when the artist pontificates about racial inequities in lengthy remarks incorporated into his pencil-and-watercolor works, he mumbles in his beard. Just give us the visuals, man, and let us draw the conclusions.

New York artist Peter Dean encrusts his canvases with toothpaste-like daubs of high-keyed color, which lend his storybook-gone-amuck imagery the dumb fussiness of cake decoration. It suits the dainty garden scene of “The Abduction” (huge bird plucks pig from baby carriage to blank dismay of bonneted child) and adds an amusing spuriousness to the yellow glow of the campfire in “Palisades Egg Fry,” a scene of urban vagabond life.

Berthold Haas is clearly stricken with the pan-European apocalyptic malaise that manifests itself in the guise of such deja-vu devices as a homunculus in a swirling red “sea” and a running figure licked by flames, a vacantly staring nude harassed by a yellow dog and a poor fellow staring at his shriveled hand near an airborne cocktail glass and a clock with jumbled numerals.

Texan Lee Smith’s scrubbed, meticulous approach to the figure is somewhat reminiscent of ‘40s artist George Tooker’s magic realism. But Smith populates his drawings and paintings exclusively with small boys organizing themselves into elaborate pranks, quasi-military efforts or land and sea missions that smack of the gentle brand of science fiction of a Ray Bradbury.

The two sculptors in the show are as wildly different as the painters. John Mottishaw perches neatly attired male figures in tensely upright postures on freeform white wood frameworks. Although the titles of the works (and a lone female torso) announce the theme of male-female relationships, the blandness of the little wooden guys brings the work down to a ponderously craftlike level. Rick Soss, who--in his not-too-far-off graduate school days--used to make humorous balancing figures, is now turning out painfully chic bronze and mixed-media hollow torsos that are carefully scarred and pieced together only to crumble gracefully into a sort of post-industrial exhaustion at waist-level.

The gallery is also showing bronze masks by Robert Courtright. They come in various colors (oxidized green, gold, rose, a wood-like finish) and with an array of harmlessly decorative raised patterns that place them firmly in the category of living-room bauble. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Aug. 5.)