Santa Monica

Michel Alexis shows a knack for building frayed-edge, square paintings subtly hued and incised to look like sacred parchments. He’s also shown a penchant for bits of Gertrude Stein prose set deep into his painted surfaces. Current work adds yet another variable and some pieces fall apart under the weight of it all. To his “fragments” and text Alexis adds little ceramic putti, juxtaposing, one supposes, the fake fussiness of old art against the genuine panache of our good ole 20th Century. The message is OK but the method gets muddled. When Alexis jettisons Stein and statuettes altogether, as in a large, socially poignant work that uses newsprint and dark broody surfaces, he’s the strongest we’ve seen him.

For over three decades New Yorker Stanley Boxer has been known for thickly painted abstractions that sometimes intimate florals or landscapes. In the ‘80s he began building high relief sculptural surfaces in strange phosphorescent colors and stringing together E. E. Cummings word poems for titles. A current show gives us non-objective impressions of “Plainsroartenderly” or “Thatlacedtear,” a strong work that begins with black underpainting accented by bright yellows then subdued into dense, gray iridescent slashes that look vaguely like marsh reeds tossed by a darkening storm. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., to Feb. 4.)