LA CIENEGA AREA

It’s hard to breathe in the universe that Robert Jessup has invented. It’s a crowded, claustrophobic place where things swell and shrink as if in a fun house mirror, and we see the world with the skewed perspective of De Chirico. Even more disturbing is the fact that the visual data one might take in with a glance isn’t organized in a coherent way, but left in a jumbled heap. Clocks, broken branches, toy sailboats, figures, fish, books and fragments of statuary press against one another, yet they don’t seem engaged in a shared drama. They’re simply crowded together like mute strangers on a rush-hour subway.

Jessup’s ideas on visual perception clearly are rooted in Cubism, but he puts a few savage twists on that formula for fragmentation. Densely worked to the point of opulence, the surfaces of his paintings are tightly woven networks of daubing brushmarks in the manner of Van Gogh. It’s a lush way of applying paint, and Jessup’s color sense is fairly sensual as well--yet the mood of his work is joyless, almost terrified. Water seems to be everywhere in these pictures, and his figures--all cursed with the horrific bloating one sees in work by George Tooker or Balthus--are often waist-deep and losing ground to a rising flood. Jessup’s sense of composition can be likened to that of Sandro Chia in his use of curving forms that echo one another across the picture plane, and his pictures are riddled with art historical references--the recurring checkered floors, for instance, allude to early Flemish still-life painting. Any cool meditations on art history, however, ultimately are upstaged by the scream of psychic panic these pictures let out.

Tim Bradley is attracted to photographs of buildings that no longer exist by the tension that pulses through what he describes as “a scene that is clearly described and yet we know we cannot enter it.” He grew weary of chasing the wreckers’ ball around Los Angeles so he began constructing and photographing models of buildings and scenes with a similar ghostly presence. Using wood, plaster, dirt and anything else that achieved the desired effect, Bradley duplicates City Hall, the observatory, a run-down neighborhood grocery store, a stone patio with a crumbling column that gives it the look of ancient Rome, an empty city street. Many of his subjects are already part of Los Angeles’ romantic local folklore and his art-directed, carefully lit interpretation underscores the mystery and magic of these places. He does not, however, prettify our fair city at all; rather, his black-and-white studies of broken sidewalks and the cracked scrollwork on freeway retaining walls glamorize decay in a way that Raymond Chandler would no doubt approve. (Jan Turner, 8000 Melrose Ave., to May 24.)