Hollywood

Fruit Crop: Stepping back from the vibrantly colored pure shapes she painted last year, Martha Alf returns to penciled fruit drawings. But she brings with her some of the heightened color sense she worked so hard to explore in those paintings. As a result, this crop of pears has a more fevered color temperature. “Large Four Pears Drawing No. 2” runs a vivid violet ground into some luscious golden fruit, deliberately battering the peel into a bruised ripeness. “Three Persimmons Chiaroscuro” sets the bright orange forms against a red sea of light where they flame together like a bonfire.

The signature still-life arrangements of strictly composed produce continue to huddle lovingly amid the delicacy of Alf’s drawing. This is familiar ground and the artist moves over it with reverence and more than a trace of predictability.

Strangely enough, it is in Alf’s large C-print photographs that the purity of her forms can truly be apprehended. Here, divorced from the pencil’s seductive, massaging tonality, pears and persimmons easily assume the role of shiny idealized forms. On a metaphoric level, the photos also expand a bit on the anthropomorphic tendencies underlying many of the drawings, as in the Edward Weston photo tribute, “Persimmon,” which posits fruit as flesh to extend meaning beyond formal beauty. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to March 17.)