Wilshire Center

Helen Flint’s paintings pit the frail human spirit against the emptiness and confinement of the urban environment. Her unemotional, realistic imagery focuses on the abstract blandness of urban architecture, finding pathos in the hype and graphic brightness of motel and cocktail signs or the eerie light of a television set in one window of a dark apartment building.

Flint has a cinematic flair for image making. In her Chicago subway series, each painting recalls a still from a movie that’s been tightly cropped and dramatically lighted to pump up the claustrophobia. In the current “City Paintings,” she uses stark daylight to bleed away life and make shadows skeletal; night is densely dark and always desolate.

Perhaps in keeping with the impersonalization of a social realist observer, Flint keeps the painting’s surface as slick as fresh concrete. However, this makes the imagery somewhat monotonous and reinforces the curious emotional anonymity of the scenes. It’s as if there is a sheet of clear glass protecting viewers from the body heat of the lives on view. (Ivey Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 18.)