LA CIENEGA AREA

The biggest piece in Laddie John Dill’s current exhibition is an 8-by-24-foot behemoth of a wall relief consisting of dynamic, interlocked wedges that zoom across the wall like a black metal-flake sports car on a test track. Facets are faced in glass under which fluxes dark paint as agitated as a riptide and elegant as Venetian endpapers. Clearly indebted to Frank Stella’s Baroque reliefs and classic Minimalism crossbred with polite punk, the untitled work is all about glamour and power. About the only place it would look just right would be in the board room of a corporation that is suavely efficient and fashionable to the point of being sinister. A German auto maker might like it.

Along with three other glass reliefs, the work marks a new phase in Dill’s mature career. He’s gotten to be such a virtuoso that nothing is left to chance. Things are so resolved and overdesigned that there isn’t an ounce of juice in them that does not contribute to their existence as impressive and tasteful objets de luxe.

Nine pressed-paper reliefs appear more promising at first blush. Dill made them in collaboration with artist Charles Hilger with some possible inspiration from his gallery mate Charles Arnoldi. They look like agitated, Neo-Expressionist-spiced compositions of wedge-shaped wood chips painted to a fare-thee-well.

A nice archeological edge hovers about, but one soon notices that they are not what they appear to be but impressions made by pressing liquid paper over original material. They take on that enticing bogus edge one feels in looking at casts of, say, the Mayan Calendar in natural history museums. A funny, slightly repellent tension exists between their deadened surfaces and Dill’s hand painted additions. (James Corcoran Gallery, 8223 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 8.)