Santa Monica

Richard Bunkall is in love with buildings: their massed forms and their silhouettes and the great organ swell of exalted purpose that permeates both medieval cathedrals and Manhattan’s classic skyscrapers.

In his quiet charcoal drawings, parallel clusters of long fine lines repeatedly trace the outlines of dematerialized structures suffused with light. Fancifully, the Chrysler Building becomes a lone transfigured beacon erecting its own canopy of light against a matte black sky.

Bunkall’s wall-hung wooden models of cathedrals in forced perspective seem to be about the way such buildings are perceived by the modern pilgrim. Each precise yet generalized facade captures the feeling of the rows of attenuated saints lining the portal and the ghostly scenes carved into the tympanum--indistinct as if blurred by centuries of weathering.

In a more ambitious cathedral model designated as still “in progress,” the interior tracery of the ribs and the perforations of successive stories of windows are admirably compressed into limited space. Actually, the pieces of wood left uncarved and painted are not jarring at all; they suggest reminders of the slow progress of architectural construction in the Middle Ages. Bunkall’s unique and serious work looks backward not for gushing nostalgia’s sake but seemingly to recapture an ethos forever lost to architecture. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to Oct. 15.)