WILSHIRE CENTER

Manny Farber has it both ways. His paintings offer a realist’s clarity (Oh yeah, he’s doing aerial views of stuff on his kitchen table), but also a seemingly endless string of conceptual puzzles (How come he spelled out “Watteau” on that silhouette that looks like a Chinese emperor?). So of course Farber also has the last laugh. (“Keep explaining these pictures to anybody--kids, dwarfs, your relatives,” reads one of his painted memorandums to himself.)

As usual, the teases offered by a recent batch of works can get a bit wearing, like party games that go on all night. OK, you say to yourself, those super-large sunflowers in the painting titled “Caution” are probably intended to shake an admonishing painterly finger at the record sale of Van Gogh’s famous painting. But who are those upside-down twin cut-out figures supposed to be? And did those squashed plums meet up with an accident? Could the delicate-looking sunflowers with very long stems in the blue jug somehow be about the fragility of an artist’s career, or is that pushing it?

And yet, compared to Farber’s crowded round paintings of a couple years ago, these sparser canvases--united by repeated juxtapositions of template and cutout images--tend to pose their conundrums with a less frantic air. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 7416 Beverly Blvd., to Oct. 31.)