WEST LOS ANGELES

Despite all the talk about a return to realism, we’ve actually seen so little of it that a show of Jonathan Burke’s and David Hines’ oils is surprisingly refreshing. Paired in tandem exhibitions, the two artists present the hot and cool sides of realist painting.

Burke is the hot one, using a predominantly blue, green and orange palette to paint cozy suburban landscapes, purposely cluttered still lifes and simple arrangements of a bunch of asparagus or a spray of flowers. A couple of still lifes become lurid when he lays on a nauseating excess of turquoise, and the better ones seem overcalculated with their profusion of meaningful trivia. The landscapes, however, can be quite wonderful. Evoking the most appealing aspects of our palm-lined streets and coastal tracts, they are compact, roundly modeled pictures that seem very dear without waxing sentimental.

Hines’ work pales by comparison, literally because light neutrals predominate and figuratively because his sensibility is slippery. Small paintings of eggs look like exercises, while larger interiors and still lifes fluctuate between trompe l’oeil realist precision and near-abstraction. That he has a fine talent is obvious in Hines’ self-portrait and various other paintings, but his work is so standoffish and uncertain that it exists in an emotional vacuum. (Art Space, 10550 Santa Monica Blvd., to Dec. 21.)