Santa Monica

Way back Peter Alexander did an unusual pastel drawing of a motel sign against the night sky that evoked the charm of driving highways dotted with neon. His latest group of some 20 pictures returns to that theme in a show called “City Lights and Romance.”

“Romance” as it turns out is the name of a black Siamese rendered in sooty pastels like an Oriental ink drawing. The city lights are distant views of our fabled nightscape from hills or airplanes. Then there are rows of blurred street lamps viewed so closely they look like blobby abstractions.

As is his wont Alexander sets himself some tough problems in taste. Los Angeles’ twinkling lights are gorgeous but they are also something of a Pop cliche about Hollywood and glamour. In “Burbank” the perspective is forced so it seems to allude to a “Star Wars” special effect. In one large painting the sea of lights is cut into ominously by hills shaped like monstrous black whales, in another lightning crackles. Theres an uneasy “Day of the Locust” feel to it all underlined by roiling skys painted Neo-Ex fashion with alternating wet and dry brushing in bruised magentas and lavenders. It’s like an orderly, mechanized world is about to be eaten up by cosmic anger. They’re good pictures but something about them doesn’t quite pay off as if the artist were still trying to make up his mind how he feels about what he is doing.

Maybe he started out to set down a straight response to the L.A. lightscape and then realized he’d bumbled into the whole iconographic mess that calls up everything from tourists postcards to Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood sign and fears of colossal earthquakes. Small scale works are notably more poetic. “Dume” has the European intimacy of a Kokoschka and “Barham” is as mysterious and familiar as the feeling of driving home late from a party in a strange neighborhood. There’s nobody visible on the road but you sense life going on unheeded. You feel isolated but consoled because you know it’s like that everywhere. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St. to Dec. 5.)