LA CIENEGA AREA

The opening of two new museums for the art of our times plus a big international art trade fair at the Convention Center over the weekend have cast a mantle of excited cosmopolitanism over the town’s commercial galleries. It is a safe bet that if an artist is represented in the special museum exhibitions at either the County Museum of Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art, that artist is likely to be holding a commercial gallery exhibition in the vicinity. Out-of-town artists not in the museum shows somehow bask in their aura anyway.

Italian conceptual sculptor Jannis Kounellis has a big piece at MOCA plus three works in a commercial gallery that show there is a whole lotta alchemy going on. The most literally pyrotechnical piece poses two big stylized posies against a patterned background of screaming heads. The sunflowers spout real flame and seem to speak of European preoccupation with environmental pollution, including the nuclear kind. Two additional works are sheets of iron bearing feather-shaped dollops of lead. They broadcast odd halations of magical transformation.

Sculptor Giulio Paolini pursues a more predictable old world fixation on the weight of history. He uses plaster casts of classical sculpture and columns arranged in Dadaist tableaux. One work employs five sculpture pedestals. Two bear reproductions of a statue of a Greek youth, the rest broken sculptural fragments. We get it. The only new wrinkle here is provided by the fact that the gallery is located in the midst of West L.A.’s gay community, which sets up another set of vibrations.

Paolini’s best shot is “L’Exil du Cygne.” Two columns flank scattered, torn engravings of a hand holding a plume pen overlaid with real white feathers. This delicate mourning over present loss of reason and poetry is an old tune but well played. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to Jan. 10.)