Santa Monica

Dan McCleary has painted the tattered respectability of ethnic blue-collar life about to erupt into a Catholic idea of sin. If this is L.A., it’s a side most Westside WASPs don’t see tucked away in truckers’ houses in Boyle Heights or on the lake in Elysian Park. These psychologically saturated B-movie melodramas were interesting, but now, thank goodness, McCleary has let up to concentrate on his sometimes wobbly painting.

He still shows us lovers who kiss like fish trying to swallow one another, a kid alarmed by the attentions of an older man and valiant Latinos laboring in McDonald’s jockey caps and peppermint shirts.

But creepy anecdote is down and thoughts of the masters up. A fast-food kitchen is lit like a La Tour, a boy in a pinball parlor exists in the worlds of both Diego Rivera and Piero Della Francesca. There is a Degas-like girl brushing her hair and--almost amusingly--several portraits with a panache that looks like McCleary remembering last winter’s Fragonard show in New York.

Obviously it is a bit self-conscious, but McCleary could not go on leaning forever on unsettling subject matter. The melancholy solidity of several small portrait heads is ample proof he’s headed the right way. (Kryger-Landau Gallery, 2114 Broadway, to Nov. 15.)