Wilshire Center

The dead air of formula hangs over Charles Arnoldi’s recent “Santa Fe Series.” These small bronze and aluminum wall pieces come in all-too-predictable layerings of a small repertoire of perkily colored forms and textures. Arnoldi builds on a matrix of right-angled metal bars, adding twig elements, arrowhead shapes and flat slab fragments with his characteristic grooved imprints. Hopping on for the ride in some of these sculptures are curvy shapes that look like cross sections of furniture doweling.

Everything hangs together in a bland and cheery equilibrium. These pieces could almost be a classroom exercise on how color can make routine formal setups look more lively. Judging by the parade of red dots on the gallery price list on opening day of the exhibit, Arnoldi is pleasing his fans. The question is whether this is the right moment in his career to be turning out such innocuous bibelots.

Larger welded metal pieces seen last fall at Cal State Long Beach offered more hope that the artist might be seeking to shore up his lightweight image with richer, less tidily “resolved” and more wholeheartedly ambitious accretions of form. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to June 18.)