LA CIENEGA AREA

Gary Hall’s paintings have always given the impression that the artist is so in love with the properties of his medium that he has forgotten that they have an ostensible subject. In this case, the arbitrary catalyst for Hall’s continuing painterly obsession is rowing. Eights and double-scull crews are rendered in a variety of hues, compositions and angles against dark or clearly delineated backgrounds, either floating on or being engulfed by a sea of pigment.

Although Hall’s framing devices seem to be derived from photography (a succession of long, medium and close shots, with tight or generous cropping), his sense of mood is drawn from Romantic painting. We are aware of surface glazes and skeins, the imperceptible blending of pigments: in short, the performance of painting itself. However, until Hall marries his technique with an inherently interesting formal or narrative statement, he will continue to produce ephemerally seductive essences instead of self-reflexive images with structural teeth.

Also on display is a series of watercolors and monotypes by Norman Ackroyd. Following the tradition of his fellow English landscapists, Ackroyd paints a series of haunting, misty lake scenes in a black and white palette that highlight the abstract, pointillist qualities of a spackled sfumato rather than the flowing sentimental lyricism that the Romantic landscape usually inspires. Mechanical reproduction, with its connotations of photographic emulsion and grain, becomes inseparable from the techniques of watercolor itself, allowing Ackroyd to cleverly blur on-site intuition with contrived process. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to April 25.)