WILSHIRE CENTER

In the post-conceptual ‘80s, it’s unusual to find intelligent landscape painting. Tobi Kahn is an exception. His somber, reductive landscapes, with their arbitrary interlocking forms and heavy frames, seem to explode the conventions of the genre while at the same time paying lip service to its traditional formal vocabulary.

Kahn achieves this through a careful muddying of the distinctions between representation and abstraction, nature and imagination. Horizon lines, hills, roads, rivers, lakes and trees are simplified into studied compositions of ambiguous organic shapes, suggesting both dream-like biomorphism and cliched renditions of the archetypical vista.

Such mannerism is reinforced by Kahn’s use of built-up layers of cross-hatched impasto and deliberately etched boundaries that separate each form. While flattened perspective and a homogeneous, muted palette underscore the work’s innate artificiality, Kahn also suggests a sense of buried but luminous transcendence.

Yet there is something uneasy about these works, a feeling of entrapment reinforced by the paintings’ thick dark frames and the hermetic confinement of the compositions themselves. Kahn appears to be a prisoner of his own aesthetic, drawing life from his love of painting and the landscape, yet ultimately worn down by their historical and conceptual limitations. The results are oddly poignant and not a little disturbing. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 7416 Beverly Blvd., to June 27.)