LA CIENEGA AREA

Like Woody Allen, New York painter Gustavo Ojeda seems bewitched by the glittering grandeur of Manhattan. Focusing on the style of austere modern architecture that Tom Wolfe railed against in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” Ojeda’s urban cityscapes convert Gotham’s unforgiving monuments to wealth and power into softly twinkling towers. His is a highly cinematic take on the city and each of Ojeda’s images is carefully framed; we see the upper stories of buildings that soar upward and puncture the sky. The paltry human mess in the street below never clutters the view.

Ojeda paints with the feathery touch of a watercolorist, and when he renders subject matter with a seedy edge--theater marquees and neon signs, for instance--his work is reminiscent of Reginald Marsh. More often, however, it’s Charles Sheeler who comes to mind. Like work by the seminal Precisionist, Ojeda’s pictures are homages to symmetry and scale. Bathed in the moist blue cologne of the night sky, lit by the demure glow of an occasional street lamp, Ojeda’s dreamy visions of the city hum with the quiet sophistication of a New Yorker magazine cover.

Also on view are figurative abstractions by Alexis Rockman that have the moth-eaten elegance of water damaged frescoes. The basic formula for Rockman’s ambiguous Post-Modern synthesis of styles and influences is to stain the canvas with muted pastels (peach, pink and lilac green are favorites), then position a crisply delineated configuration in the foreground. The central recurring motif is a roiling mass of colored lines that seems as cheerful as a tangle of streamers or colored ribbons in one picture, as ominous as a nest of vipers in the next. This kind of ambivalence is the correct posture for an artist to strike at the moment. (Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to May 24.)