Long Beach

The best of Doug Moran’s work is about the visual and tactile nitty-gritty of construction--roughed-out plans and load supports and raw lengths of wood. “El Raposo Reconstructed” of 1981 is a 6-foot-long stretch of neatly hammered-down wood slats and flat white canvases with a black canvas “roof” that shuts down over the top. When you peer along one side of the piece, the inner space turns out to be delicately light-patterned into V’s and X’s.

Recent small pieces in fiberglass and mixed media with thin wood frames have surfaces sealed off as if shrink-wrapped. Motifs are mostly sketches of single, anonymous-looking buildings set against the delicate profiles of distant mountains. A group of drawings in another vein offers fields of scattered private shapes.

Most of the 1987 work suggests a period of noodling around, waiting for new ideas to strike. But even the slight pieces avoid the odd combination of cuteness and bombast of “Pomp and Circumstance,” with its tacked-on little 3-D house and high-drama paint attack obscuring the honest values of a modest flat surface propped up on wood struts. (The Works Gallery, 2740 E. Broadway, Long Beach, to Feb. 8.)