La Cienega Area

Humble things, manmade and not, huddle together in Daniel Moynihan’s pale, self-effacing paintings. Light bulbs, persimmons and tomatoes are lumped together on a green ironing board with deliberate lack of ceremony. The muted pearly gray bulbs and the dull red persimmons seem oddly kin to one another. Moynihan also aptly mates pears and light bulbs. The work seems to be about the life of objects as apart from their human uses; suddenly it seems as if all things, live or inanimate, may exist in a secret confederacy of twinned forms.

“The Pineapple, Dunmore, Scotland” takes a slightly different tack. A pineapple reigns in exotic splendor on a small island over a handful of small, chalky rocks. A vague blue-white mountain rises dreamily in the background. The image--has the puckish, eccentric flavor of vintage travel ads. A graduate of London’s Slade School of Art showing solo for the first time in Los Angeles, Moynihan adds a welcome piquancy of his own to his “typically English” low-key, mist-suffused palette, fascination with the mundane and literary bent. (McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to Feb. 8.)