La Cienega Area

Wavy vertical arcs and bars of color, tucked into neat compartments, create the superstructure of Brock Klein’s mixed-media paintings. Repetitive forms benefit from a dexterous shuffling of color, as well as wrinkled, paint-saturated eddies of collaged paper, precisely willed drips and decoratively ragged black brush trails charged with memories of the Orient.

Klein’s photomontages celebrate a self-conscious marriage of painterly energies and the body beautiful. In the eight-part “These Things Be Silent,” a paint-spattered male torso is liberated in stripper-like stages from a pair of white tights. In “. . . As If by Swimming. . . .” twin bodies curled like quotation marks are juxtaposed with views of an abstract cutout. Funny thing is that after looking at these pieces, streamlined body silhouettes begin to pop out of the paintings, especially “Everything Always Works Out.”

(Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Dec. 5.)