LA CIENEGA AREA

Susan Moss describes her latest, vividly colored “Tropical Earthslide” paintings as “abstractions which come directly from powerful experiences I have had with primitive, hot, dense climates both external and internal.” Certainly the works themselves, with their combination of sweeping, frond-like arcs and impastoed automatic calligraphies, create an image of dense undergrowth, of fecund overripeness in a state of fervid agitation.

Moss enters dangerous territory, however, when she attempts to link the tropical landscape with emotional and “spiritual” self-discovery. This is essentially a late 18th-Century Romantic notion of painting, whereby nature and the artist’s ego are inextricably linked through the so-called transcendental art object.

Almost all of these tenets have been effectively undermined by formalist and structuralist criticism over the last 30 years, and Moss’ dependence on such well-worn rhetorical devices as the gestural brush stroke and overlapping kinetic flourishes tend to make the viewer more aware of recycled painterly language and contrived image-metaphor than any self-contained resonance in the work itself. Such artists as Gerhard Richter and Roy Lichtenstein have made careers out of dismantling received information such as this, and Moss does herself little justice in expecting us to take such obvious manipulation at anything other than material face value. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 25.)