The Thomas Babeor Gallery (7470 Girard Ave.,...

The Thomas Babeor Gallery (7470 Girard Ave., La Jolla) is presenting a group of selected sculptures, watercolors and wall reliefs by Fletcher Benton. The internationally respected San Francisco-based sculptor is best known for his heroically scaled, multicolored constructivist works most advantageously sited and viewed out of doors. The sculptures at the Babeor Gallery however, are small monochromatic interior works that are cunning and elegant rather than aggressive and energetic.

Among the works related to earlier series is a “Folded Alphabet Q” in bronze. Some years ago Benton conceived the idea of using letters from the alphabet as sculptural models opening from plates of steel. For each letter there are the exterior, linear and interior elements pivoting open and separating from one another. Thus for Q there are a vertical steel plate with a negative circle and tail, a solid ring for the letter itself and a solid circle (paradoxically) for what we usually perceive as negative space. The use of the alphabet was a strategy that generated a handsome and engaging body of work.

Benton has more recently found inspiration in forms from American Indian art. The attentive viewer will find, in addition to regular geometric forms, stylized symbols for clouds, mountains and feathers.

Benton is a master at mixing forms in complex and challenging relationships. His works appear dynamically balanced no matter the angle from which they are viewed. He is incapable of making a work with a weak side.

One yearns, however, for the kind of roughness that evinces a testing or pushing of limits to energize an exhibition of such ostensible (even ostentatious) perfection.

In his back gallery, Babeor is showing a group of Frank Stella lithographs, the earliest dating from 1977. In the vividness of their colors and wild variety of forms they are images of the Proteus-like genius of their maker.

Both exhibitions continue through Feb. 26.

Nearby, an exhibition entitled “The Art of Dining” is on view at Gallery Eight (7464 Girard Ave., La Jolla). It’s not about food but the things you use in conjunction with getting food from the table to the mouth, including cutlery and works in clay, fiber and glass.

All 19 of the artists included in the exhibition are represented by fine, usable works of art. A few standouts, however, are David Tisdale’s anodized aluminum, exotically colored, knives and spoons; David Boye’s handcrafted and decorated carving knives; Florence Cohen’s ceramic vessels and plates decorated with small geometric forms; Diane Bonciolini and Greg Messmer’s slump glass dinner set of black rectangles with minimal linear decoration on one side; Steven Maslach’s blown glassware with fine swirling black lines; Tom Hatton’s humorous ceramic soup tureen and cups in the form of camels, and Anne Hirondelle’s sculptural stoneware tea service in Oriental forms.

The exhibition, which epitomizes craft as art, continues through March 8.

The front space of the Conlon Grenfell Gallery (527 4th Ave.) is entirely given over to an installation by Santa Fe, N.M., artist John Connell. It is a wildly imaginative work of art, the fourth part, entitled “Study of a Creature Storage Shed,” of a larger work called “The Construction of Kwan-Yin Lake.” Spray-painted drawings cover the walls; sculpted animals occupy the floor and space overhead. There are elegant cranes, seagulls, crows, fish, a huge tortoise and human beings (both whole and in parts). All are made of coarse materials such as wire, paper, tar, plaster and wood. Connell calls the installation a “mind-space” for the androgynous Chinese deity Kwan-Yin. The installation has the character of New York’s East Village art but it is gentler, more spiritual.

Out of commonness of materials, elegance of forms, shifts of scale, roughness of modeling and metaphysical longings, Connell has made a strange harmony of discordances. The longer you stay in the space, the better you feel.

Conlon Grenfell’s back space also has its treasures: two remarkable paintings and a lithograph by David Diamond and works by Robert Sanchez, Gail Roberts and Russell Adams.

The exhibition continues through Feb. 25.