SANTA MONICA

Jim Peters and Adam Cvijanovic, two painters from Massachusetts, recently made waves on the New York scene. Each makes works combining disconnected, often cinematic imagery with painterly brashness. The recipe is often a seductive one for collectors and dealers. It satisfies the need for emotionally charged, conservative representation while paying lip service to “post-modernist” notions of pluralism and ambiguity.

In practice, however, the results are often stillborn, covering technical and narrative shortcomings with oblique allusions to alienation and fragmentation. This is particularly true of Peters, whose multi-media paintings exploit the sexuality of seminude women in cramped, claustrophobic environments. Peters’ strength is his ability to confront the viewer with a highly charged image. However, by resorting to extraneous materials, cut-out windows and cliches of expressionist paint handling, Peters makes us more aware of language and process than of the innate vitality of potentially erotic scenarios.

Cvijanovic’s triptychs suffer from more basic narrative problems. Crudely rendered juxtapositions of film icons, tenement buildings and Eric Fischl-like sexual couplings seem to be striving for some Romantic notion of love amid the ruins. Unfortunately, the situations are either too arbitrary or too obscure to invite more than perfunctory participation, and Cvijanovic’s deliberately muddy renderings suggest that obfuscation rather than conceptual insight is the real objective. (Maloney Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., to Sept. 5.)