Wilshire Center

David Bierk’s new paintings, collectively titled “In the Absence of Paradise,” are medleys of copies from famous artists of the past. The styles are reproduced with superficial accuracy, but each work is either much larger or much smaller than the original. Bierk is big on Fantin La Tour’s flowers, Gauguin’s Polynesian scenes and Vermeer’s unforgettable women. There is something unpleasantly manipulative about this work, with its couplings of brand name artists and popular images, its fake sentimentality and its stentorian appeal to the viewer to recognize the underlying meanings of art.

Bierk combines Vermeer’s woman with a pearl earring, a painted sunset sky and landscape photographs into a fiction he calls “Home/Wife to Vermeer.” He juxtaposes a Bwami mask with a portrait of Freud and a Degas painting of a father and daughter as if to say, “See, this is really deep, stuff on many cultural levels.” And he ostentatiously genuflects before the cold perfection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs and tragically brief life with the painted image of a curly haired Greek god in “In Remembrance of Icarus, to Robert Mapplethorpe, Manet, Claude Lorrain and the Planet Earth.”

The artist pursues a somewhat more grounded, less hype-conscious theme in another group of works in which rather crude paintings of landscape amplify on photographs of quintessentially “artistic” natural views: a pond at twilight, a summer storm. Scenes like these, typically chosen for bravura painterly effects, now seem more persuasive as captured by the mechanical eye of the camera--which suggests that painting no longer has the vision or the vocabulary to summon up the old magic. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Feb. 3.)