WILSHIRE CENTER

Kostas Lekakis is a Greek-born printmaker currently living and working in California. His first solo exhibit in the United States consists of an unintegrated, skimpy selection of woodcuts, etching/aquatints and engravings completed over the past six years, serving to highlight his considerable technical skills, if not his aesthetic originality.

Lekakis’ subjects are eclectic in the extreme: Zorro, the Last Supper, St. George killing a hermaphroditic dragon, boxers slugging it out in the ring. He attempts to tie these disparate elements together through the now-cliched stylistic tenets of Expressionism. Superficially at least, the results closely resemble Picasso’s work of the 1930s, an edgy dialectic of Mediterranean sensuality and German Angst . Yet Picasso developed an archetypal style that perfectly communicated the psychic damage of the Fascist era, while Lekakis’ simulation comes off as bland quotation, an exercise in bravura mannerism that does little to compensate for the fact he has virtually nothing to say. (Richard/Bennett Gallery, 332 1/2 N. La Brea Ave., to Dec. 30.)