Santa Monica

Suzanne Caporael has been turning out some glorious big paintings recently, employing her distinctive mix of romanticism and irony.

An air of attendant miracle suffuses “Cathedral,” a huge roiled cloud blanket in a symphony of rose, green and ivory suspended over a dark field and pierced with rectangular “windows” to the blue sky. In “No Crying Aloud (No. 1)” a wedge of cloud pokes down into softly folded black hills, an apparition with something of O’Keeffe’s organic sensibility.

Caporael’s tartly titled allegories are about human vulnerability. Waves lap over tantalizing glimpses of formless flesh in “I Heard You the First Time.” In “Always the Fool,” the fishing rod held by a stick figure in a boat landlocked in a gray room turns into a body of water--mocking the notion of a solipsistic universe.

But the painter’s most personal quality is the way she conjures up the sensation of being in the presence of the sublime without quite allowing oneself to believe in it. In the darkness of “Yes, But Why,” small human silhouettes rise above a tall, narrow pier, its supporting piles mysteriously nibbled away--by a trick of light? by some natural force? Caporael’s gift is to sustain that curious mingling of expectancy and tension. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 2114 Broadway, to Oct. 11.)