WILSHIRE CENTER

Johann Winckelmann, who waxed lyrical about classical art and the “Apolline” ideal of beauty back in the 1700s would be gushy over this mini-show of about a dozen works by Carlo Maria Mariani. Of all the anacronisti and pittura colta contemporary Italian painters (in English: guys who exhume personalized quirky versions of classical motifs), Mariani lies closest to the saccharine posturings of such Neo-Classical painters as Anton Mengs.

There is none of the tumult of Enzo Cucchi or the provocative kinky nudge of Sandro Chia. Mostly we get--and this show of paintings, drawings and graphic works is no exception--winsome, languishing, uncircumcised youths bemusing ruins or one another, and rotund maidens with plaintive expressions and limbs that turn to vegetation. We’ve been told that the posture here is nostalgic, an escape through imagination and art from freeway snipers and the scary grime of technological society run amok. Though some of this clearly operates in these works, that may not be the whole story.

The discordant, equivocal works never let us take Mariani’s utopian longings too seriously. Dazzling technical virtuosity and inspired draftsmanship are constantly pitted against vapid, even laughable content: An entranced goddess holds a cherub by an ankle apparently reflecting on his diaper rash, a sprawled out youth holding paint brushes rests his foot on a antique fragment that looks like those pointing-finger signs indicating “this way up.” These allegorical disjunctions and a certain insipid eroticism that is never tangible enough to be interesting lead to the conclusion that this visually seductive art may not be harking for Arcadia, just contemplating its navel. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 16.)