La Cienega Area

Marina Karella is a Greek painter with a fondness for white, which she uses to create both filmy dream-visions and kitschy big birds in flight. The dreadful birds are generally built out of buttery trowelings of white impasto on flat, white or blue-tinted skies. In “Toward the Waterfall No. 2,” things improve below bird-level, where rushes of gauzy white blur the boundaries between a mysterious canal, an interior chamber and a waterfall whose white flow surges across the bottom of the canvas.

In “Afternoon Sun,” a draped table and pictures on the wall become dematerialized and abstracted in a wishy-washy, unsatisfying way. Karella is on surer footing with scenes more firmly rooted in tangible reality. The snowy-clothed restaurant table of “Number Eight Twelve” in a hazily illuminated setting of lacquered wood is a sensory image of a life of privilege. “Clarice’s Corridor,” with its soft white verticals and moonlit reflections, is a plausible romantic vision of a familiar place. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to June 16.)