LA CIENEGA AREA

Imagine Paul Delvaux’s dreamy buxom women lounging in European courtyards translated into tough athletic types striking attitudes on sun-glanced urban American rooftops and you’ve got a rough notion of James McElhinney’s recent paintings.

Unlike Delvaux, however, the 35-year-old Philadelphia painter imbues the architectural elements in his work with more resonance than the women, who pose topless or in unbuttoned shirts like ads for a product with a “liberated woman” image.

McElhinney’s style is flat, unemotional, uninflected. He has a keen eye for the patterns formed by vents, exhaust fans and stray puddles as well as for the slightly muzzy look of objects seen through sunlight filtering through polluted city air. But his firmly fleshed, ruddy-faced Amazons are boringly interchangeable ciphers. Lacking painterly interest or psychological depth, they fail to kindle tensions across McElhinney’s rigorously ordered spaces.

The artist seems to offer an anecdotal solution to the problem in “Conversations in a Part of the City” by bringing a couple of more individualized men into the picture. Squatting on a rooftop, a man holding a can of beer surveys a pair of sleek legs belonging to a woman whose upper body is lopped out of the painting. Below, in the street, another man chats with a girl in abbreviated sports attire. Yet, whatever feminist message the viewer might read here pales beside McElhinney’s highly personal dialogue with space and inanimate form. (Jessica Darraby Gallery, 8214 Melrose Ave., to Aug. 8.)