Wilshire Center

Lita Albuquerque’s “Time and Earth” series clearly aspires to be a thing of mystery and poetry. But the design of these pieces has a rote, formula quality suggesting a backdrop for a chic advertisement rather than a metaphysical or spiritual excursion.

The basic format is a small, roughly triangular hunk of stone that sits on a big copper ring attached to a large copper base. A spill of powdered pigment--red, yellow, green or blue--clings like snow tinted by stage lights to the crevices of the rock and piles up on the base.

Whatever their permutations, primary tints suggest little more than, say, a sampling of new shades in cosmetics piled up in amusing ways for a Vogue spread. Albuquerque has used color much more allusively in another recent series, a group of powdered-pigment paintings of mountains shooting delicate debris into dazzling night skies.

Oscar Lakeman takes the containers painters use to hold their colors as the subject of a recent series of paintings. As if hovering over his worktable in a low-flying craft, he surveys flat lakes of color, looming brush handles and individual brush hairs, the shapes of odd cups and jugs and the random conjunctions of shadows. Such emphasis on the drizzling and spattering of multicolored paint here, there and everywhere virtually transforms studio messiness into a retro salute to action painting.

Their painstaking but ultimately banal quality may be meant to demystify the artist’s calling or make deadpan comparisons with the presumed goals of art. At least, that’s what one assumes when looking at these paintings in a sophisticated gallery. Seen in less exalted surroundings, they might seem like little more than technically accomplished exercises in making art out of whatever happens to be at hand. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to May 7.)