LA CIENEGA AREA

Following last year’s series of mixed-media paintings based on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Michael Tang has turned his attention to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Clearly influenced by the writings of psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, Tang explores familiar characters such as Cinderella, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood and the Frog Prince as psychological archetypes, symbols of sexual transformation from childhood to maturity.

This is hardly virgin territory, and in unskilled hands it usually leads to cliched, dime-store Freudian prognostications, where all pointed objects are inevitably phallic and every narrative action implies some form of sexual neurosis. Conceptually at least, Tang usually avoids such simplistic analysis, but his execution falls into most of the same Neo-Expressionist traps that dogged the earlier “Hopkins” series.

Crudely painted three-dimensional tableaux have all the subtlety and nuance of high-school stage scenery and props, forcing us to become more conscious of overwrought painterly and sculptural bombast than the symbolic relationship between object/image and archetype. As in most cases of unambiguous metaphorical interpretation, the language of the medium becomes the real subject of the work, providing further proof that this sort of thing is best left to the imagination. (Eilat Gordin Gallery, 664 N. Robertson Blvd., to May 23.)