WILSHIRE CENTER

Sheila Metzner is a fashion photographer who utilizes a French developing technique called Fresson to produce a grainy, hand-tinted look resembling 1920s Vogue magazine advertisements.

Homogenized superficiality is the name of the game here, for regardless of subject matter--portraits of film directors, nude models, sleek women clad in Chanel suits and hats, still lifes and deco furniture--Metzner manages to reduce everything to lifeless decor. Nostalgia is used as a signifier of good taste in an attempt to transform rank commercialism into fine art. Roland Barthes would probably have waxed lyrical on the Establishment’s metamorphosis of conspicuous consumption into the myth of desirable chic, but the real bottom line is commercial art in the guise of contrived style.

Also on display are ceramic torsos by Ron Cooper. They expand his habitual concerns with light and space into the more concrete realms of figurative sculpture. Male and female trunks in both clay and bronze are broken down by surface “designs” in the form of Abstract Expressionist drips and Mondrian-like zigzags or grids. This represents an obvious extension of earlier “Flashlight Torsos,” time-delayed Polaroids that recorded the tracings of fine-beamed flashlights over nude bodies. Here, however, the classical and modernist allusions are much more overt, reducing both the figure and art history to mere relics.

Those familiar with Cooper’s work will find nothing new here, except perhaps a restatement of his concerns with destabilized structure that began with the light traps of the late ‘60s and continued with portrait vases of last year. Cooper is, if nothing else, totally consistent, though not always as challenging as he might be. (G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 7224 Melrose Ave., to June 28.)