Wilshire Center

Michael Duke Pavoni’s large oil-on-paper paintings of Renaissance female busts are executed with the quick, anatomically sensitive hand of 16th-Century Italian sketches. Across all the faces Pavoni paints contemporary commercial logos, each reverberating with meaning. He uses black paint on brown paper, heightening the effect of a precious drawing. He portrays a bevy of those veiled female heads with the aquiline noses, wide-set eyes and velvety countenances that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo loved to paint. Some we can actually recognize from art history; when we stumble, Pavoni gives us hints, as in the moody rendition of the “Doni Madonna” with the Paramount film emblem scrawled overhead.

Set in the form of a cross, “Six Madonnas/Ivory” presents six demurely suffering maidens. On the one arm we make out a large, dripping “Ivory” (taken from the soap label) and a few letters from the familiar Christian Dior trademark. A few loops from the title of the campy Interview magazine ooze across several other visages.

Exhuming these pretty, nostalgic ladies, Pavoni uses popular revivalist tactics. By adding emblems of industry, he joins the conceptualist cry that reality is created by purveyors of information. In the Renaissance, patrons and their favorite artists disseminated pat but not necessarily real concepts of femininity. Today, the brokers of meaning are soap manufacturers and media moguls. At least Pavoni has the drafting skills to cradle this bleak fact in considerable formal finery.

Also shown are huge color Polaroids by David Leventhal. He arranges toy cavalrymen, shooting and roping on cottony surfaces, then photographs them with one of those rare massive Polaroid cameras. Like Patrick Nagatani’s work in the same vein, the fuzzy-focus staged scenes tug at our notions of reality. (Richard Green Gallery, 830 N. La Brea Ave., to Sept. 3.)