Wilshire Center

As painting continues to revert to historical models of representational realism, many artists turn to the psychological narratives of the Symbolists and Surrealists for both visual and conceptual sustenance. Susan Hall is a good case in point, evoking the enigmatic mindscapes of Puvis and Redon in a new series of paintings that exude an eerie sense of foreboding as well as ethereal intangibility.

As usual, Hall sets her post-Freudian fantasies at night, focusing on obvious sexual symbolism (fish, locomotives looming out of the darkness) or more ambiguous situations that suggest rites of passage--shadowy figures paddling canoes, wading in swimming pools or crossing a bridge by moonlight.

Stylistically, Hall employs loose, sketchily rendered blacks, blues and pinks on roughly gessoed surfaces to set up a tension between stark illustration and the more Gothic attributes of traditional Symbolist painting. Each image seems to float unsteadily and artificially on the surface of the canvas, creating a shallow representational space that contradicts the apparent archetypal “depth” of the fantasy itself.

Unfortunately, this interesting formal dialectic is stymied by Hall’s dependence upon predictable narrative symbolism, whereby a well-worn “Surrealist” vocabulary tends to reinforce psychological cliches rather than transcend or explode them. (Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., to July 3.)