LA CIENEGA AREA

Michael Dvortcsak returns to the local gallery scene with paintings that give the impression he has spent too much time studying the British artist John Walker. Like him, Dvortcsak opts for an ambiguous recurring motif--a monolithic, rock- or cocoon-like form in a cave-like setting.

Dvortcsak mines the rhetoric of the 19th-Century Romantics, applying brooding pigments with a palette knife to create highly material surfaces that play off the false perspective of his compositions. Unlike Walker, however, Dvortcsak is unable to avoid the painterly mannerisms that ultimately undermine his attempts at the “sublime statement.” Rather than feel the internalized view of nature that the artist so desires, we are simply aware of the exterior, formal qualities of paint: smeared, scraped and manipulated to the point of obsession.

In contrast, Steve De Groodt’s mixed-media paintings are so understated and undeveloped that they are indecipherable. Apparently inspired by recent travels to New Guinea, the work incorporates symbols of the indigenous population (shields, yams, canoes) and translates them into obscure statements on the culture’s imminent demise at the hands of the West. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on the artist that such appropriation of “primitive” iconography for the purposes of western aesthetic distillation is fraught with the same contradictions that the work purports to question. That might have made for an interesting show. (Simard & Halm Gallery, 665 N. La Cienega Blvd., to May 16.)