LA CIENEGA AREA

Fueled by the inspiration of the New York School, Joan Brown first came to the fore as part of the late 1950s Bay Area figurative expressionists who included her mentor, Elmer Bischoff. Since then, Brown has pursued an idiosyncratic path that has drawn heavily on ancient images and symbols in order to project a stripped-down aesthetic governed by spiritual optimism and stylistic simplicity.

“The Golden Age,” Brown’s paean to the harmonious idyll of the Age of Aquarius, is the culmination of this process. Natural adversaries, such as the lion and the lamb, the peacock and the snake, the deer and the wolf, are brought together as part of Brown’s “Peaceable Kingdom,” while references to Ikhnaton, the humanist Egyptian pharaoh, underscore the artist’s identification with an ancient utopian vision that celebrates inviolable truth, beauty and justice.

Brown’s pie-in-the-sky ode to Pollyanna would be hard enough to take seriously even if she employed a painterly style that allowed for the remotest audience participation. As it stands, her bright, lurid colors; faux-naif renderings; flattened, frieze-like perspective and denial of nuance, subtlety, the slightest ambiguity or, heaven forbid, skepticism, make for an unbearably bombastic and self-righteous body of work. Ironically, it squeezes out the very humanism (with all the contradictions that implies) that it purports to extol. This art is so absorbed in its own blinkered ego that it makes the need for a critical response totally irrelevant. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Oct. 4.)