La Cienega Area

Tony Scherman specializes in sidelong glances and magnetic first impressions. His paintings, tenderized with layers of encaustic, often offer dreamy images of single women who leap out--as in a lover’s vision--from the duller stream of humanity at bars and restaurants. Backgrounds are more or less monochrome, textured rectangles that nonetheless suggest the feel of cozily wood-paneled places with lustrous mahogany table tops. Women’s outstretched arms and shoulders, a dangling earring, a purple blur of lipstick become instant objects of desire.

Faintly rendered double-images or extra limbs in some of these works seem ill at ease with such a comfortably traditional style; rather than adding temporal complexity, they call awkward attention to themselves. In “The Red Leash,” for example, the Toronto artist peers under the tablecloth and lights on the legs of a waitress in a swirled skirt, the demurely crossed ankles of the customer and her perky dog. Scherman’s easy painterliness--the leash is just a curling red brush stroke--gives the little genre scene a pleasurable fillip. But the floating, lightly outlined arm that curls down from the top of the table--presumably showing a gesture the waitress makes either before or after this moment--seems an overly self-conscious distraction.

In a group of airy black paintings on paper--the darkness is eaten away by waxy incursions--Scherman nails down quick takes of dogs, a rabbit, still lifes and women’s faces. The viewer senses that the artist likes to pounce on ordinary things at odd, disjointed moments. A few of the full-scale paintings venture into realms beyond bustling eateries--in one canvas, a couple dally in a moonlit pool; in another, a black servant tends to a white woman in bed. But these images somehow lack the extra spark of the heady stare in semi-darkness that picks a single, entrancing detail out of the rushing world. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 20.)