La Cienega Area

In his new paintings of lush vegetation and long-legged birds, John Alexander makes you think for a moment that he is one of those idiosyncratic little masters from another era, a stylist whose delicate dry-brush technique has remained a connoisseur’s delight despite the vagaries of fashion. In truth, the Texas-born artist (who lives in New York) is in his early 40s.

Easing away from the plethora of mask-like staring faces--with their suggestion of Ensor crossbred with Basquiat--that figured in his work of a few years ago, Alexander now concentrates on the dense and humid mysteries of growing things. In “Fernwood,” a tangle of green growth and skittering layers of color has a voluptuous richness. “Blackbird Lane” is a medley of hits and dashes of color, a sideways rushing of stems and leaves suffused with light.

Animals still have a presence in this primeval kingdom. The white bird and shadowy lurking cat in “Evangeline’s Dream” are mysterious denizens of a paradise of flame-like flowers and red lily pads coasting on black water. Birds haven’t made such an impact in painting since the heyday of Morris Graves. In Alexander’s hands, they are either elegant stalking swamp creatures with an archaic flatness and linearity or shrieking cocks whose bodies are flaming eruptions of the brush.

The latter edge closer to Alexander’s artistic alter ego, a moralism as economical, quaint and forthright as the ringing prosody of an old-fashioned preacher. In “Bible Stories,” a staring man wearing a huge red pointed nose, oddly dematerialized despite his bulk, is riven with self-knowledge as he reads the Good Book. A staring monkey sits on his shoulder, emblem of his sins.

With his visionary qualities and independence from modish concerns, Alexander belongs to the tradition of such unpeggable American painters as John Quidor and William Rimmer. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to June 25.)