WILSHIRE CENTER

Film maker Luis Bunuel once observed that “the essential mystery of all things must be maintained and respected.” New work by Lita Albuquerque seems to be an homage to that idea.

Titled “The Sleeping Beauty,” the series is a visual tone poem on intuition, metaphysics and romantic love as both jailer and liberating force. Made of oil, pigment and plaster on silk, these fluid figurative abstractions seem to be undergoing a metamorphosis and exist on the threshold of the unknowable--terrain that tends to invite treacly self-indulgence.

To her credit, Albuquerque manages to invest her mystical inquiry with a tough, dignified edge. Tough though they are, her exotic pictures are also lovely to look at. A glimmering, slivered crescent recurs in a number of them, as does the profile of a sleeping figure that runs across the bottom of the picture plane like a range of low mountains. Above the slumbering form explodes the cosmos, shooting out sparks with every breath.

The sleeping figure splits into twins who drift through electric blue space in one small canvas, while three planets, one of them red, keep watch over the figure in “Red Was the Color of Her Waiting.” Albuquerque has structured the series in sequential episodes but refrains from revealing if Sleeping Beauty is finally awakened from her slumber. This is as it should be as the definition of “awake” is a highly subjective thing.

Also on view is a series of paintings by Luis Serrano titled “Diurnal/Nocturnal” (a fancy way of saying day/night). Peculiar still lifes with the muffled, mute quality of work by Jasper Johns, Serrano’s pictures are subdued and a bit bleak. Among the items arranged on circular tables for our inspection: a porcelain foot, a figurine of a chicken, small plaster casts of eyes, ears and various body parts, dishes, fruit and a small turtle in a partially dismantled terrarium. Working in acrylic on paper, Serrano makes impeccably neat paintings of silent scenes that are somehow completely out of control. They’re rather disturbing pictures. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Oct. 11.)