Wilshire Center

The works of Takako Yamaguchi seem like the flip side of modernism’s borrowing from the Orient in the late 1800s. She makes huge bronze leaf and oil on paper paintings of doughy, not quite perfect nudes in the spirit of Lucas Cranach. Standing or supine, these loom large before sfumatoed vistas with horizontally registered volcanoes spewing gilt clouds, arbitrary swatches of pattern worked to look like worn kimono prints and bubble gum pink columned temples that look more indigenous to Atlantis than Japan. Huge serpentine tendrils, suspiciously sperm-like, hover over the fragile maidens.

These labor-intensive works tap the drama of the Renaissance and the Eastern love of pattern for its own sake. They have the prim elegance of silk screens and the feverish edge of an erotic day dream. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Sept. 30.)