Wilshire Center

The lush landscapes of San Francisco artist Pegan Brooke are a disturbing mix of naivete and passion. Rolling hills and plowed fields at the edge of a jungle are stylized, almost childishly direct. Yet they manage to stir up dark forebodings about the future of this verdant paradise. The threat is hinted at in the fractured trees growing along the river in “Of The Rocks” and in the silent birds sitting above twisted boulders at the water’s edge. The unspecified terror is most keenly felt, however, in the rows of golden grain in “Moonrise (The Wait)” that begin to dance like flickering flames at the foot of a planted pyramid of lush vegetation while the sky is ripped by a jagged cloud.

Brooke’s stylized tropics recall Henri Rousseau’s lush jungles, but she shows the aggressive majesty of a noble land under siege. Like Van Gogh’s landscapes these scenes are whipped to a frenzy by animated brushwork that turns plowed fields into scars on living skin and hardens leaves into dried cocoons.

In the next gallery Jay Johnson interlocks flat, single colored shapes with the devotion of a jigsaw fanatic. He treats negative and positive shapes as equally solid then asks the question posed by the old perceptual test, “Which do you see, two faces or a vase?” Both answers being right, the models are tumbled together in a densely piled cubist space and neatly perforated by the shape of an inverted lighted candle. It’s an intriguing approach to the traditional still life that makes a game of translating painting into sculpture and smudging the boundaries between negative and positive. (Saxon/Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to Jan. 28.)