WILSHIRE CENTER

Jim Dailey makes his solo gallery debut with a series of large landscapes that seem more concerned with reviving and reasserting the rhetorical properties of painting than with exploring either the language of representation or the way we “read” the landscape itself.

Employing a limited palette of predominantly purple, brown, orange, green and sky blue, Dailey creates what amount to studies in field perspective, bathing canyon pools or receding cypress groves in a flood of bright light in order to contrast the linearity of both form (real false object) and shadow (fake false object).

The perspective is occasionally disrupted by an extraneous object--a David Ligare-like “Thrown Drapery,” an obelisk or architectural form reminiscent of Astrid Preston’s classically composed landscapes or Peter Lodato’s interior geometries--but more often exists in its pristine state, absent of man yet undeniably shaped by his ordered personality.

The work’s seductive “painterliness” and use of clearly defined contrasts seem an attempt to perpetuate the romantic aura and representational deceits of landscape already denounced ad nauseam by painters as far-ranging as Gerhard Richter and Mark Tansey. Lacking the inherent contradictions necessary to create either formal or emotional resonance, the work merely rests as a false validation of what was in doubt to begin with. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 5.)