WILSHIRE CENTER

A series of 16 black-and-white homoerotic photographs by Jack Shear depicts well-built young men who appear to float in an airless vacuum. Positioned against a seamless white backdrop, Shear’s subjects strike various poses--one stands on tip-toe, another does a headstand--but all are more or less alike in their perfection. Homages to youth and the glory of the beautifully toned body, Shear’s portraits are informed with a hushed classicism reminiscent of work by sculptor Robert Graham.

Also on view are painted Polaroids by Victor Raphael. He doesn’t exactly embellish photographed images so much as he uses the size and shape of the Polaroid to define an arena. Indeed, he frequently obliterates the photographic ground altogether with abstract patterning that is frequently rendered in gold leaf. We see a solid field of gold, a whirling vortex, a nest of crosshatching, a configuration of dots that reads as a map of distant constellations.

Though Raphael works for the most part in this Minimalist miniaturist mode, a few works do incorporate figurative imagery. A weird sea creature casts its shadow in an ocean of deep blue in “Sea World,” while the transparent outline of a male figure hovers before a shingled wall in “Self Portrait at Pollock’s Studio.” (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to July 18.)