La Cienega Area

Jeff Gambill has Venice on his mind. Venice, Italy. He returned two years ago from a lengthy European sojourn, including six months of living in the fabled city. Since then, he has worked from sketches and memories to produce his first solo show of paintings. You won’t recognize the romantic port’s landmarks in his work; Gambill knows Venice too well to do the obvious. Instead he has filtered his experiences of a historic place through a sensibility that favors the abstract, the emblematic and the framed object. Whether extracting a single object from a scene or schematizing a panorama, he makes his subjects seem containable if not easily comprehensible.

Titles of “New Year’s From the Balcony” and “The Boatmen of the Giudecca Rowing on the Grand Canal” may suggest realistic scenarios, but Gambill reduces them to boldly patterned, segmented abstractions. “The Bilingual Conversation” centers on two separate spheres of energy, while “Summer Night Meeting (Electric Storm)” depicts a lightning bolt striking a funnel of circles. Gambill himself isn’t sure of the sources of some of his imagery. He suspects that a ring suspended by a rope against a clear blue sky in one painting may come from Venice clotheslines and that bulbous brown shapes in another work relate to dock equipment, but his art is essentially a matter of impressions made concrete. That the impressions ring true is largely due to his ability to translate authentic experiences into earnest paintings. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Aug. 6.)