LA CIENEGA AREA

New York artist Kim Keever joins a number of painters who use stylistic mannerism to express attitudes toward art and science in an age saturated by information. In Keever’s case, the “victim” is nature itself, represented by a series of idyllic beach scenes rendered in thick impasto. The paint handling is so overwrought it exaggerates the expressive qualities of all painting, revealing the medium to be little but a series of arbitrary rhetorical flourishes. Keever puts further distance between the landscape and its simulated image by adding a recurring motif of numbers and rulers, reducing the transcendent properties of the sublime to a mere mathematical measurement.

Sounds like a workable way to express the crisis of faith that results when man tries to master and mythologize nature at the same time, but Keever’s deliberately clumsy paint handling tends to take on the form of “mythology” itself. He rapidly turns simulated style into a new creed, as rigid and as the rational abuses it purports to attack. We are left with a series of painterly contradictions, where aesthetics are simultaneously demolished and worshipped. (Davies-Long Gallery, 8906 Melrose Ave., to Feb. 28.)