Venice

Italian artist Domenico Bianchi, who uses tile rather than canvas as a support, offers a variously textured and colored meditation on the many lives of a linear image with components suggesting a cross, a scalloped wing, a barbell and a pear. Although he is said to view himself as a sort of depersonalized drone repeating actions that stretch back into the history of painting, Bianchi doesn’t let this self-consciously modest posture get in the way of his subtle craft.

Nearly 7 feet tall, recent untitled works in wax, gesso, oil, fiberglass and plaster are at times reminiscent of intarsia detailing on furniture or old, neglected ornamental pavement. In one piece, yellow wax squares alight on a mottled slab of plaster with a deep red incised area. In another work, a muddy peach rectangle of fiberglass contains the barbell-and-pear image surrounded by a radiant white oval built from a stubbornly circling and recircling line.

In an equally large drawing, the rounded shapes are reworked in patient blue pen strokes that build form out of the accretion of line. Bianchi’s effort in delineating and repeating an image in different formats suggests a painstaking effort to ensure its continued existence within the historical loop.

English artist John Virtue, in his first Los Angeles solo show, nurses a vision of the Lancashire countryside that’s all dense foliage, half-hidden dwellings and peeks of sky. Memories of Samuel Palmer and John Crome hover, in this crossroads of the cozy and picturesque.

Virtue pushes his ink-and-charcoal views into the late 20th Century by lining them up in grids of as few as four or as many as 72 images. Depending on the size and number of these separate drawings and the degree to which they closely resemble each other, the grid structures either send the eye darting all over or move it along in a regular rhythm.

The drawings are suitably meticulous cross-hatchings gone gloomy with concentrations of blackness, but the daubs of white gouache Virtue sometimes adds--apparently in an attempt to loosen up the structure--look disconcertingly messy up close. (L.A. Louver, 77 Market St. and 55 Venice Blvd., to Aug. 6.)