LA CIENEGA AREA

“The Spiritual in Art” is de rigueur these days, and Craig Antrim’s new paintings, with their allusions to religious mysticism and the supernatural, are typical of this revisionist genre. They are also prime examples of its shortcomings, attempting to transcend the metaphors of painterly language by conveniently ignoring the deceits of its artifice.

Mixing acrylic with thick, viscous rhoplex, Antrim builds up impastoed fields of pigment that seem to coalesce into ghostly images resembling winged dragons and angels, as well as spiraling vortices and cocoon-like sheathes. Using several layers of underpainting, Antrim tries to suggest that these forms lie buried beneath the surface, or as he puts it, “waiting to be known.” He thus becomes the vehicle for their revelation to the viewer, a variation on the presumptuous idea of “artist as Messiah.”

What Antrim cannot do is deny the material nature of his medium, and by extension its metaphorical accountability. Through critical eyes, the “spiritual” (whatever that might mean) becomes so much rhetorical hocus-pocus. Strip away the suspension of disbelief and we are left with Abstract Expressionism minus the expression. (Ruth Bachofner, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Dec. 31.)