LA CIENEGA AREA

Oops, what a surprise! Randall Lavender’s new work is like going to see your old hippie friend and finding him wearing a tux and brilliantined hair. It takes a minute to realize it’s the same guy.

Lavender is among the more promising artists trying to sort his art out of the mountains contending for attention these days. Previous shows have found him a maker of beautifully crafted assemblage tableaux where tender and romantic ideas are approached in the accents of nonchalant cool and intellectual rigor. Millions of sensitive young guys have acted like this for a million millennia.

Suddenly Lavender’s gone Neo-Classical-Revivalist in eight large figurative paintings that look like fragments from the decor of a 19th-Century robber baron mansion at Newport. Nude allegorical figures float in handsomely crafted architectural formats worthy of McKim Mead & White--a revival of the American Renaissance that was a revival of the Italian Renaissance. A revival of a revival.

Once we recover from admiring Lavender’s unexpected skill in figure painting, we start wondering what the heck this is all about. Has another young talent sold out to the revisionist forces of Post-Modernism?

Not quite. Too smart. The first clue is the female nude’s messy hair. She’s not an allegory; she’s a real girl. And the guy. Looks a lot like a self-portrait. Looks like Lavender is once again acting out a private and personal romantic odyssey. In “The Island,” he is literally beside himself in his idealization of a cool blonde. In “The Beckoning,” he wafts enchanted by a dark girl’s witchy spell while she remains self-absorbed. “The Secret” reveals that the girl is enthralled by her philosopher-father.

Lavender proves that any style can be employed as a mode of conceptual art and that something as presumably cerebral as conceptual art has roots in emotion. The complexity of his formula gets a bit crabbed, but he does make the point that universal myth and private striving are the same thing.

A small anteroom show of graphics by John Alexander has the feel of American Social Realism of the the ‘20s and ‘30s updated. Alexander likes to draw apes, clerics and brides. It’s a kind of satire that tilts at all religions: primitive, popular and traditional. Your basic raspberry at the world, in nicely sharded graphic style. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 31.)