Santa Monica

When artist Jay Phillips died in 1987 at the age of 32, his paintings, painted sculpture, cast bronzes and prints were being critically celebrated for their painterly Abstract Expressionist brushwork and decorative patterning. His passing drained away much of the energy that had kept West Coast decorative painting alive into the mid ‘80s.

These early “Dresser” freestanding paintings show the jazzy approach Phillips brought to the thin sheets of aluminum he cut, bent and covered with bright and garish color. Devoted to abstract pattern they exude an enthusiastic disregard for propriety, exploring the freedom of gesture with a can of spray paint while popping out the painting’s surface into three-dimensionality. For all their genuine exuberance, however, the past few years have tamed the initial irreverence so the sculptural paintings now seem almost nostalgic. The gutsy relationship between the tough materials and the hedonistic landscape imagery remains appealing, but it now carries a larger sense of being part of the past.

Dunnieghe Slawson also refers to the past with bronze sculptures that read like natural archways formed of petrified skeletal remains. Most of the forms are organic, tending toward human or animal ancestry yet are ambiguous enough to also suggest posed dancers. On a landscape, the forms would seem surreal and ominous, like pieces of carcass ripped from an alien kill. But perched on pedestals--like coffee table bric-a-brac--they lose the heat of the hunt and begin to suggest designer bones. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to Jan. 28.)