WILSHIRE CENTER

Emerson Woelffer makes a welcome return to the local gallery scene with a generous selection of paintings, collages and drawings that find the veteran “Surrealist” continuing to mine a fruitful Modernist vein. With their sinewy, white calligraphic lines on predominantly black and blue backgrounds, floating biomorphic shapes and automatist smudges and doodles, these canvases owe obvious debts to, among others, Arp, Miro and early Pollock.

More interesting than historical precedent, however, is Woelffer’s improvisational technique, whereby line, mark, abstract/figurative metaphor and subject-ground relationships ebb and flow, twist and bend in a constant state of flux. The results are much like a visual equivalent of jazz, a loose mapping out of those fluid ribbons of sound one finds, say, in a John Coltrane solo.

Careful study can metamorphose Twombly-like scrawls into dancing torsos and momentarily frozen faces, while seemingly solid backgrounds disintegrate and re-form through a mobile concoction of luminous gestures and stolid impasto. In lesser hands, these ingredients could easily lapse into tired mannerism. Woelffer’s strength lies, ironically enough, in his sure sense of composition. What appears at first glance to be purely automatic and chaotic gradually comes together as a tightly choreographed performance: occasionally dissonant, often dreamlike, but always highly charged. (Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., to July 21.)