La Cienega Area

Ynez Johnston’s paintings are sui generis. They are rather like a cross between tattoos and pieces of embroidery from a proud non-Western culture that abhors vacuums and loves brightly colored, multifarious detail. Recent works, in oil and mixed-media (or acrylic and casein) on rice papier-mache mounted on canvas, have a thickness and porous texture that belie the delicate, continuous drizzle of imagery. Tiny markings and wandering outlines create rambling, fanciful universes--rectangles filled with teeming patterns, picturesque structures and enigmatic processions--that are bordered by rows of fanciful outlined creatures.

In collaboration with her husband, John Berry, the artist--who will be 79 next month--also makes tabletop sculptures (she adds the fine details to the wood carvings he makes after her initial drawings, which are subsequently cast in bronze). These are structures peppered with tiny three-dimensional beasties--balancing on top, posing in little niches--and a steady drumbeat of incised pattern. Sometimes mask-like, sometimes animal-like, sometimes reminiscent of ancient monuments, the chimerical forms these sculptures take look as though they might have been created by some lost civilization--which probably could while away 1,001 nights telling the tales encapsulated in the works’ ornate surfaces and eccentric silhouettes. (Mekler Gallery, 651 N. La Cienega Blvd., to June 17.)