LA CIENEGA AREA

“Berlioz in Brazil” is the evocative title of Yda Ziment’s latest series of mixed-media paintings, reflecting not only her extensive travels throughout South America but also her training as a musician in the early 1960s. The Israeli-born, L.A.-based artist applies a loose, expressionistic style to an essentially Fauvist palette to create kinetic abstract images that evoke both lush vegetation and some undetermined form of ritual symbology.

The results are a predictable combination of grandiose sensuality and annoying mannerism, whereby any sense of emotional catharsis or transcendence is undercut by stylistic and conceptual cliche. The historical distance created by recycling worn-out gestures and signs merely negates the immediacy of the painterly act and the intended ambiguity of its metaphors, producing work that is flat, derivative and ultimately redundant.

Also on display are mixed-media works by Francesco Siqueiros, nephew of the great Mexican muralist. Generically entitled “The Times Series,” the works present a confusing jumble of pictorial ideas that have been squeezed together or overlapped into tight, extremely claustrophobic spaces. Lumpy biomorphic forms, crudely etched figurative and still-life outlines, map-like calligraphies, expressionistic splatters and floating geometric planes vie with each other in a shapeless dialectic that tries to be too many things at once--both painterly and diagrammatic, automatic yet vaguely formal. We are left with a loose palimpsest of undeveloped jottings, as if Siqueiros is hinting at some unrealized magnum opus that is, as yet, beyond his powers to either articulate or organize. (Eilat Gordin Gallery, 644 N. Robertson Blvd., to Sept. 3.)