La Cienega Area

Karen Carson, a persistently worthy L.A. painter, continues to make abstract art that is most easily described in realistic terms. Somewhere in the distant past she took off from Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series but has gone so far her own way the comparison is now barely helpful.

A recent group of works incorporates so many picture frames, wood moldings and illusions of perspective they impart a sensation of walking around in a uninhabited bungalow, peering down corridors, wondering what might be in those cupboards or behind that door.

She’s done that before. What is new here is a sense that the abandoned dwelling has been inhabited by an artistic squatter--maybe a citified American Indian with a penchant for graffiti and a memory of tribal blanket patterns.

Paintings are dark with sooty black against strips of mirror and zig-zags of stinging pastels. They tend to feel choked and overdone but the technical flaw contributes to a dark expressionistic atmosphere of vandalism. They are almost like depressed memories of personal violation. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to July 2.)