Santa Monica

Whimsical, happy shapes arranged on black or slate backgrounds by New York artist L. D. Lawrence hearken back to Klee and Miro. She uses a lexicon of simple repeating shapes to make a language of symbols ambling and skirting in a space that suggests a chalkboard or a tabula rasa. Sometimes a triangle rides atop two small “wheels,” minuscule shapes cluster above a half moon and look as if they’ve just been propelled out of it, other shapes are connected by spindly black lines that Miro used to such advantage. The sources that feed this work are apparently complex. We’re told much of the work is inspired by Russian and French literature. In the better pieces there is a sense of conceptual sophistication, but mostly we see that Klee and Miro still have the artist in a nearly suffocating grip. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to Feb. 2.)