Wilshire Center

When Steve Heino started playing with the “Ship of Fools” theme, it looked as if he were going to use his considerable talent for jiggering the textures and colors of found materials into a pleasing whole to turn out genuinely meaningful work. But his recent mixed-media output fails to do more than circle decoratively around the ideas it proposes to deal with.

In “Heads Will Roll,” two small dummy-like heads--one upended--sit on the floor, leaving a pair of deep pink depressions and thin wood-lined chutes inlaid in a large metal lithography plate that hangs on the wall. A target shape, petite and coy, sneaks into the “found” pattern of the plate manufacturer’s markings. Alas, it’s all too tidy and smug to work on any level but craft.

The pieces that mate two disjunctive images also seem more stylish than deep; Heino comes off as little more than a conceptualist wanna-be in “Folly,” with its block letters in a metal frame spelling out the title word. But if you ignore the note of doom in the titles and coast along on pure good looks, a number of pieces are decked out with delicious meldings of form and alternately crisp and weathered color--like the Art Deco curves of the smoke in “Smoke in the Hold” and the three-part solid that appears to unfold in “Reef” and “Sweet and Juicy.” The “Effigy Figures” too, with their easy-going, throwaway memories of Cubism, show Heino in radiant control of eye-appeal. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Nov. 30.)