LA CIENEGA AREA

Driving home from Larry Hurst’s show of mixed-media constructions, I fell in line behind a Department of Water and Power truck. Loaded with a cement mixer, a stack of lumber and an orange cone--all arranged on a yellow framework that had red and white diagonal stripes in one corner--the rear view of this conveyance might have been a grimy, real-life version of the pristine inventions in Hurst’s current exhibition.

Among the 17 works on view are enormous painted wood abstractions--usually built of abutting, overlapping vertical members and a counterpoint of horizontal stripes or bands of cropped lettering--as well as tiny poetic assemblages of both found and specially fashioned elements. Recalling signs, billboards, buildings and refuse heaps, this art has the character of urban vignettes that have been dismantled, cut up and reassembled in tightly designed compositions.

There’s not a breath of country in this art, but there’s no hint of Pop art’s cynicism, either. Hurst’s big, bold wall pieces are refined inheritors of Stuart Davis’ optimistic view of the urban landscape. Smaller pieces that incorporate rusty metal and weathered wood combine the flavor of early Rauschenberg with hints of George Herms and Joseph Cornell. Taking these precedents in stride, Hurst fashions weighty reliefs with the ease he formerly applied to small collages.

His new move seems to be off the wall and it isn’t altogether successful. An enshrined “book” and a pedestal piece with a rusty metal wheel stationed in front of a painted panel both exude an admirably independent authority, while a diagonally divided purple and black panel combined with pillars on the floor and a wandering wire seems willfully dissonant and overly eager to be fashionable. (Simard, Halm & Shee, 665 N. La Cienega Blvd., to March 8.)