La Cienega Area

It is risky business to hit too many bases or mix too many metaphors, but painter Jeff Gambill seems to accomplish this and emerge not just unscathed but smelling like a rose. Influenced by a visit to Venice, Italy, he produced impressive, light-drenched abstract landscapes uncanny in their ability to evoke but never quite describing things we know. He has pushed the work firmly into biomorphic abstraction with paintings that relegate landscape elements to tiny nostalgic vistas.

The predominant subjects are huge, brown bladders that could be anything from some accidental impression to animal parts or aliens. In “Bound,” an inanimate mass is held by tiny red filaments affixed to poles. In “The Death of Salvador Dali,” the shape is menaced by blades, and in the beautifully painted, thoroughly eccentric “The Origin of the Milky Way,” the huge pneumatic shape sends novas and stars into a vast blue universe like a breast spewing milk.

Gambill did not just master the lush, limpid colorism of Venice, he apparently absorbed the whole tradition of Italian Surrealism as well. To his credit, the repeating organic forms that populate his paintings--lime green domed mosques that suggest nipples, a breast-shaped aperture cut into a plane to reveal a hearkening landscape--have a regenerative eroticism that is much more universal than anything Surrealism offered us. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 La Cienega Blvd., to Nov. 11.)