LA CIENEGA AREA

You could imagine Virgina Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway setting a table like the one in Cornelia Foss’ luminous, orderly still lifes. These are paintings of things momentarily in view--the colored inks on the spine of a splayed-out book, the creamy, unstable pink of the inside of a seashell, a green fruit nestled in the folds of a blue cloth, soft-edged orange globes masquerading as peaches, the far rim of a bowl leaping out as a splotch of darker blue.

When Foss adds a pair of tablecloths to one of her five versions of the scene, you know exactly how lightly the white damask skims over the table and how skittish the lustrous pouf of blue is apt to be. When she paints a model in this setting, however, the woman’s blandly unarticulated body doesn’t look as though it was seen by the same eyes. But reduced to just a few of her component parts--pale outstretched legs and long arms in “Emma Resting”--she offers an astringent complement to the light-inflected life of objects.

Foss, who hasn’t had a solo show locally since her Ferus days in the ‘60s, also paints large and small landscapes. In the tiny ones, a slim wedge of foliage and vague, blocky architecture is sandwiched between flat stretches of earth and sky, a favorite trick of the 17th-Century Dutch. The stunning work in this group is the full-sized “Christopher’s Net,” in which a cloud has the buoyancy of a bed sheet billowed up by the wind as it hangs out to dry and a gossamer badminton net hovers against rows of green fields and velvety grass.

Alexander Mihaylovich is an American artist in his late 20s who spent some time at Roman archeological digs in Belgrade as a teen-ager. This experience was the basis for a group of rather mannered acrylic paintings of ancient sculptures, crumbling, ancient architecture and miniaturist-style gardens of pinpoint flowers and small-leafed plants. The paintings’ plaster frames come complete with trompe l’oeil rust and cracks and real holes presumably simulating cavities left after marauders stole the valuable trimmings.

This is a romantic view of the ancient world, one that appeals to a taste for precious objects and small things made with evident skill. If Mihaylovich has any fresher point to make, it is obscure. (454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to Aug. 20.)