LA CIENEGA AREA

John Nava’s series of collaged paintings incorporate a variety of pictorial elements, from original drawings to seemingly “finished” details in oil, to create a highly mannered breakdown of compositional vocabulary, in which every painting becomes the sum of a limitless (and by extension, arbitrary) number of possibilities.

His cool, draftsmanlike manner reduces painting to a blueprint or pictorial “how-to” manual. With classical figurative and architectural elements sharing the same field as gestural washes and modernist grids, each becomes a mere device in a larger framework that serves to demystify the aura of the artwork.

There are signs, however, that Nava is beginning to fall into the very rhetorical traps he is attempting to critique. His repetitious, montage-like compositional style has begun to resemble a formula, an individual signature that draws attention away from rigorous concept and focuses it back on the artifice of the all-seeing artist. Historical mannerism, rather than acting as a subversive strategy merely transforms into high art, legitimizing process and pluralism as purveyors of “beauty” and “unity”--a strategy that Nava clearly doesn’t condone.

Franklyn Liegel explores destruction and decay in mixed-media assemblages that resemble ruined dwellings and towers. Using oil, acrylic, paper, gauze, thread and glass, Liegel creates dense, labyrinthine structures that seem to be disintegrating and mutating. Architectural ruins act as palimpsests of ancient strata and blurred historical continuity. Unfortunately, in asserting his belief that “art should be friendly,” Liegel saturates his forms in such bright colors and the cliched excesses of Expressionism that any real aesthetic or political resonance is undermined by the decorative nature of his execution. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to June 21.)