LA CIENEGA AREA

Ruben Kocharian is a Los Angeles-based, Russian/Armenian emigre painter whose meticulously rendered nature studies and still lifes typify the stultifying academicism of official Soviet art. Technically superb and almost Pre-Raphaelite in their obsessive attention to detail, Kocharian’s repetitious array of flowers, fruit and gnarled tree trunks exalt representational realism as if the 20th-Century Modernist experiment had never existed.

The results are predictably mannered and reactionary, recalling the high-blown claims of the Victorian Romantics that only the exact duplication of nature can offer a true insight into the boundless spirit of the human soul. This is the sort of establishment-sponsored, fake sentimentality that Komar and Melamid have effectively dismantled using the very same painterly vocabulary. The difference is that the latter set up a critical distance by which we can decode the work’s language as received information. Take away the conceptual parentheses and we are simply left with long-discredited, naturalist dogma.

Continuing the emigre theme is Malcolm Susman, an English sculptor who arrived in Los Angeles via Israel. Susman’s painted steel pieces develop a recurring cloud motif, metamorphosing his billowy, weightless subjects into hard-edge, cut-out shapes dissected by lightning flashes and thunderbolts that themselves seem to defy gravity. Although the work has the potential of some interesting linear and spatial contradictions--in particular an innate tension between kinesis and stasis--it is undermined by a naive, childlike sensibility that stresses easy symbolism over rigorous formal innovation. (Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Aug. 15.)