WILSHIRE CENTER

Although Philip Slatger is currently based in Los Angeles, his gestural abstract paintings and screens express the vocabularies of both his recent sojourn in New Mexico and time spent in New York during the 1970s. Slatger attempts to integrate the specific iconography of the Southwest Indians with a broader urban expressionism that is characteristically brash, emotive and highly physical.

In certain respects, the work is reminiscent of the grid-like primitive friezes of Uruguayan painter Torres-Garcia. Both artists draw upon native hieroglyphs and symbology and then rephrase them within Western formal structures. Whereas Torres-Garcia was drawn to tight, de Stijl-like geometries, Slatger, painting with his fingers, prefers a looser, more emotive framework that verges at times on graffiti or Abstract Expressionism.

In “Dutch Painting of the Golden Age,” for example, deeply etched black lines resemble ancient runes, which not only serve to ground the painting within evocative linear parameters, but also to underline the sociological significance of mark-making per se . Slatger’s enveloping mosaic of lumpy color fields in blue, gray, pink and white provides both a real background and a metaphorical context, whether in the form of interlocking limbs or anthropomorphic, totemic allusions. The title, with its historical reference, partly undermines the work (stylistically), yet simultaneously grounds it in an ongoing tradition of painting.

The exhibit’s chief weakness lies in the overly self-conscious nature of Slatger’s formal synthesis, creating a slightly mannered stiltedness to work that should loosen up once the artist blurs and expands the boundaries between his influences. (Roy Boyd, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to April 2.)