La Cienega Area

At first look, Richard Fishman’s recent sculptures seem off-puttingly glitzy, rather like baroque versions of gift shop stuff, ponderously barnacled with glitter and shells, bones and stones. Once the most ascetically academic of artists, Fishman seems to have jettisoned his essential integrity in pursuit of a false vision.

Some of this work is fussy to the point of silliness. In “Solar Lunacy,” for example, he indulges in the self-conscious decorative gestures of sticking big shards of glass into gobs of sparkly gray silicon carbide and tacking on a bristling gold-painted tree limb. But a few other pieces have a certain primitive allure and several use the idea of surface accretions to create striking visions.

Iridescence appeals to the Providence, R.I.-based artist in a disarmingly wide-eyed way. Two pieces--one, a bent stalk towering nearly 11 feet--display blue butterfly wings in profusion, and the quick green flash of beetle bodies dots several others. Encrusted open (and empty) boxes are another favorite device, underlining the all-is-surface theme that seems to run through this work.

But the most effective pieces are the couple that suggest ancient statuary, like the untitled oxidized bronze animal whose lumpy surface is somewhat reminiscent of a Han Dynasty horse or “Chiron (Wounded Healer),” which has the attenuated, linear silhouette and clay-like clotted surface of a Malayan statue. Fishman explores another fruitful route in “Rootrap,” in which a tall, basket-like steel cage sits on top of a knot of black goo and shell-encrusted roots: a surprising marriage of spare, dry form and dense, vegetative accretion. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to May 29.)