HOLLYWOOD

One of the ways art likes to look these days is primitive and mystical. The ideas of tribal, ritual and nonverbal ways of knowledge seem to pop up in every gallery in town; Bob Alderette’s mixed-media work is a textbook illustration of the genre. Employing a shamanistic tote sack of odds and ends--beeswax, twigs, fabric, gold leaf--his work has a rough-hewn quality and looks as though it’s held together with spit and magic. Some of the paintings are ragged, torn and tacked to the wall while others are framed under glass; they all tend to be vertically composed and read from left to right like metaphysical equations. With cryptic hieroglyphics scratched here and there, and titles alluding to ideas of exile, transcendence and exodus, the work suggests that Alderette perceives the artist as a combination healer/pathfinder.

Also on view are abstract paintings by John Rose that move with the subtle, stylish elegance of an aging dancer. They lean and sway, and they’re very sexy. Like a chamber musician, Rose works on a relatively small scale; his paintings are about painting, and his aims are modest and clear. Poised at the center of each canvas is a perfectly executed turn--a brushy mass of color that hovers like a cloud in the process of metamorphosing into a twister. This inexplicably gentle eruption is tethered to a substructural geometric grid that peeks through now and again. Framing the central configuration and functioning as a final embellishment are vertical lines that unspool like ribbons. Marvels of balance and control, Rose’s paintings are built on an ideal of measured grace that could come off as stuffy in the hands of a lesser artist. He makes the idea work. (Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to June 21.)