HOLLYWOOD

As in work by Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt, Peter Zakosky’s epic landscapes present the natural universe as the splendid stage on which man acts out his baffling play.

In his first solo exhibition, this young L.A. painter flashes the technical chops necessary to ape those 19th-Century landscape masters, then updates their romantic recipe by investing it with delightful metaphysical humor. In “Desert Animals and Spots,” for instance, we see eight animals perfectly rendered as if for a child’s textbook; floating overhead in a calm blue sky are eight wispy cloud formations that seem to be the souls of the beasts depicted below.

Animals are a central element in Zakosky’s pictures and he endows them with the droll, implacable gazes of enlightened gurus. Cows, in particular, seem like oracles of great wisdom in Zakosky’s realm. Weather, in all its terrifying and moody glory, is his second theme and his work resonates with biblical implications in its depiction of the sky as a great equalizer.

The source of floods, twisters and rainbows that descend like sentences meted out from on high, the sky--alternately godless and sheltering--consumes the majority of many canvases. A ghostly rider on a white horse whose black doppelgaenger runs alongside races across a dark prairie in “Death Overtakes a Jockey,” while a swollen green river threatens to devour a small town in “A Flood.” The whole roiling ball of wax is presented in “Heaven and Hell and In-Between,” where we find mannish creatures scampering about on all fours in some fiery kingdom far below the earth’s surface.

Zakosky’s impressively crafted pictures would come off as hysterically paranoid were it not for the sneaky humor that informs them. In “Arizona Visitation,” a gorgeous parcel of desert braces itself for a thrashing from a mean gray sky looming overhead; strolling cheerfully through the brush, oblivious to the approaching storm, is none other than Fred Flintstone. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to May 3.)