WEST LOS ANGELES

Lorraine Lubner and Melinda Miller are both painters concerned with formal strategies to express emotions. Both work in a broad, gestural style, juxtaposing busy brushwork and gnarly, dissonant impasto with an obvious attempt to anchor the composition in some form of symbolic metaphor.

Miller is more overtly psychological, centering each work on a self-referential blue mass, conjuring up images of roughly outlined islands or torsos. These calm interiors are surrounded by agitated, nervous outer edges in warm, flesh tones, which are supposed to send the viewer hurrying to the relative, albeit awkward, stability within. Lubner, in contrast, grounds her densely packed, retinal textures, in a simple, cliched system of zigzags, Xs, Os and spirals, contrasting warm and cold, chaos and order (decoration), linear narrative and open text.

Neither artist really comes to grips with the loaded implications of her painterly metaphors, however. Both assume that colors and forms have untainted emotional and subconscious repercussions above and beyond their abstract qualities as paint or marks on the canvas.

Unfortunately, stylistic expressionism has built up a significant vocabulary of false rhetoric over the years, devaluing both Lubner’s symbology and Miller’s color coding to the point of overwraught melodrama. If the tools of the trade have degenerated into such archetypical mannerism, then self-questioning artists such as these really ought to declassify their medium’s codes as rigorously as they exploit them. (Art Space, 10550 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 8.)