LA CIENEGA AREA

Landscape painters like Farhad Ostovani, for all their Beaux-Arts technique and stylish bravura, are ultimately irrelevant, largely because they work within traditional parameters with one foot firmly planted in the 19th Century.

In Ostovani’s case, the historical source is French naturalism, although his sketchy renderings of windswept cypress trees, formal gardens and rolling landscapes also evoke the delicate draftsmanship of Japanese watercolors. Evocatively juxtaposing emotive gesture with strict formality, surface mark-making with a more resonant layering of light and dark coloring, Ostovani effectively imbues his subjects with seemingly cathartic force.

Unfortunately, this sort of painterly language has been irrevocably smeared by the structural lessons of conceptualism. We no longer see harnessed natural forces as a simple extension of the painterly muse, but rather as cleverly worked representational rhetoric. Work of this sort is doomed to be dismissed as an historical anachronism, forever looking backward in search of some nostalgic panacea. (Herbert Palmer Gallery, 802 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Sept. 30.)