THE VALLEY

Collectively titled “Evening Landscapes,” Walter Impert’s latest realist paintings and pastels capture the Los Angeles cityscape at its most romantically seductive. Whether unveiling a panorama of city lights viewed from Mulholland Drive or evoking the muted tranquility of an Echo Park neighborhood at dusk, Impert creates an idealized, people-less world where the moody chiaroscuro of silhouetted forms is softened by the diffused haze of the inversion layer.

Compositionally, Impert anchors each work along intersecting vertical and horizontal axes, cutting his receding horizon lines with a solitary lamppost or telegraph pole. This creates a sense of formal cohesion, where man’s contributions to the environment--apartment buildings, freeway bridges, high-rises--are less ugly scars defacing the natural landscape than constructive parameters that help to define it.

Impert’s problem is that he expects us to take his vision of the formal sublime at face value. Unfortunately, the skeptical eye tends to break each work down into an interconnected network of rhetorical devices. Rosy-tinged clouds and sunsets glistening on water come straight out of 19th-Century Romanticism, tight framing alludes to the cropping vocabulary of commercial photography, while the works’ geometric compositional values owe certain debts to Impert’s early dabblings in abstraction.

For a hybrid aesthetic such as this to transcend the obvious mannerism of its language, it must go beyond subtle contrasts of light and dark, color and form and say something about the historical validity of representational painting itself. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., to Oct. 30.)