LA CIENEGA AREA

Michael McCall has gone all out for “The Abstract Landscape,” his first show at a recently relocated gallery. He has built a cosmic landscape--made of sand, rocks, glitter plus various found objects and handmade elements--in the center of the back parking lot. A huge painting on Dacron fills the long, front window with an amorphous scene called “The Last Waltz on Melrose,” for no apparent reason. Inside walls are covered with more wall-size paintings on translucent fabric; large canvases that emulate gritty slabs of concrete; smaller paintings done in glossy, marbleized pigment, and “Tarbabies,” a batch of little painted squares of tar paper.

Unfortunately--or perhaps appropriately, according to titles--the only works that really stick together are the “Tarbabies.” These ragged-edged, crusty-surfaced, earth-colored paintings are well-designed, cohesive abstractions that suggest ancient symbols and Indian artifacts while remaining in tune with themselves. In most of the rest of the show, McCall’s dreamy vision so dramatically exceeds his grip that his art wafts off into scattered vignettes or just quietly disintegrates. Some pieces bear a resemblance to those find-the-images-in-ink-wash projects that used to be assigned to art students. Others--including ‘Melrose,’ with its cute little transparent fish window--have the impact of shower curtains.

As McCall sets tiny pictographic images and symbols adrift on vast pastel expanses suggesting sky or water, he loses them in untethered aspirations. (Simard/Halm Gallery, 8006 Melrose Ave., to June 8.)