HOLLYWOOD

By now, habitues of local art are familiar with the paintings Frederick Wight has made since retiring as the distinguished director of the UCLA art galleries that bear his name. Although he painted academic portraits in youth, then expressionist figures and abstraction, he has tended to concentrate more and more on landscape.

We are accustomed to the fact that his paint sometimes waxes scrubby and clogged and that a form is perfectly likely to grow as leaden as a stale doughnut. None of this is a nuisance because technical skill is not what his best work offers. At best, Wight manages to convince us of something akin to visionary insight, as if he viewed nature from a vantage point attainable only after a long and thoughtful life.

Obviously, sustaining such a sensibility is a dicey business and Wight is by no means capable of bringing it off every time any more than any viewer can see it every day.

There are pictures that work in an under-edited group of more than two dozen examples currently on view. These seem to be the more abstract-metaphysical compositions such as “Two Moons,” “Sea” and “Desert Morning.”

What is almost more interesting is a significant shift in the general climate here. Even when dealing with tropical subjects, many pictures have a glacial coldness that makes them feel like something the mature Edvard Munch might have painted on a trip to the North Pole. They are more than ever evocative of pure spiritual insight, but their psychic state seems about to part company with their expressive vocabulary. (Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Feb. 2.)