LA CIENEGA AREA

Craig Antrim has painterly talent coming out of his ears but he is still trying to figure out what to do with it. A couple of dozen works include one oversize canvas called “Imago Ignota” whose structural red verticals splash and sizzle like fountains of fire. Smaller compositions on paper are masses of waxy, heavily impastoed whorls, zags and hatches that alternately bring to mind cave painting, mysterious tablets from lost religions or emphatic Japanese emblems in red and black. Gold creeps like a luxurious fungus.

Allusions aside, this art keeps colliding with its nearest ancestor, Abstract Expressionism. Every time Antrim rounds a bend that looks like it leads to expressive freedom, he runs into Robert Motherwell or the shade of Adolph Gottlieb. He whips up some of the most enthusiastic richly decorative surfaces being made hereabouts. He avoids much of the Byzantine excess of his own recent past but he just can’t get out of the bind of being on used turf.

The sensibility of the work never quite gels. It winds up relying too much on its own lush textures. It’s kind of like small-group ‘50s jazz being played by a symphony orchestra tricked out with exotic bells and gongs. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 23.)