West Los Angeles

Rectangular formats with repetitive stacks of blocky color and the dogged impulse to bury them under angry-looking scratches give a number of Lenne Grusky’s recent paintings a dully querulous quality. A welcome lyricism comes into play in square-format works in which the Los Angeles artist lets more freely positioned slabs of high-keyed color interact on their own, without letting the tortuous grafitti stomp all over the place.

In “Parameters Two--16,” for example, broad swipes of color fit together with the easy grace of a puzzle, and the persistent hatching and zigzag overlays confine themselves to walk-on roles that don’t take over the entire production. Another fruitful alternative on a larger scale, “Parameters Three--29,” offers a jumpy medley of soft green, salmon and yellow brush strokes flickering around a central peach area that deftly tucks in its edges and refuses to be a stolid rectangle.

Denise De Broy is also keen on scratching away at her paintings. Typically, the Los Angeles artist lays down a multicolored design, covers it with a dominant color and removes bits and pieces to reveal hints of the coloristic subtext. The strength of these works depends largely on their formal cohesiveness and the impact of the color choices. If too many paintings seem inconclusive and lacking in presence, that may be the result of her attempt to create simultaneous syntheses of opposing qualities (intuitive and rational, ambiguous and explicit, and so forth).

In the better pieces--like “Untitled SM-4,” a tomato soup swirl peppered with hints of green and black and snapped with a single, effective Big Dipper-like form--De Broy is more clearly in control of her domain, allowing accident to help shape the painting without giving it the last word.

A lone assemblage by the artist offers an array of small bric-a-brac (a cookie cutter framing tiny hands touching a doll’s head, Victorian-waif lithographs, a minuscule wax figure of a man, broken scissors) that don’t quite add up to a mood or a point of view. (Art Space, 10550 Santa Monica Blvd., to Sept. 10.)