Wilshire Center

In his “I, The Spectator” series, Los Angeles artist Luis Serrano paints a stirring world of brooding color and transparent emptiness. His acrylic on wood still lifes of scenes around his studio are littered with hollow glass boxes, fine wire cages, glass covered bookcases and table tops thinly overpainted to the point of almost drowning their forms.

What seems to interest the artist in all this clutter is an accumulation of forms that builds a transparent yet dense composition of nearly pure line and veils of color. “La Llegada” pictures the floor and a portion of a round glass table littered with paint cans, cages, glass boxes and pieces of mirror. On the floor dim linear shadows of the circular form repeat as the darkness of the scene is washed with a brick red stain pierced through the center by a vivid blue glare from the edge of the glass table top. Space moves in these paintings with the all-over whirl of Manny Farber, but the narrative seems more visceral, though decidedly less explicit.

Newcomer Margaret Honda’s sculptural barbed wire armor is a clever parody on the “live by the sword, die by the sword” adage. As objects the prickly, loosely woven helmet, shield, wolf muzzles and codpiece succinctly emphasize the pain that being battle-ready and self-protected can inflict on the individual. It’s a clear statement that gleefully puts new teeth into old saws. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Oct. 15.)