Santa Monica

Peter Saari paints intricate architectural schemes that mimic old Roman wall paintings. They are an interesting layering of faux over faux. Saari’s fragments of colored walls replay the perspective ploys of classic architecture yet include their own trompe l’oeil devices. He has got the Roman penchant for illusionistic architectural perspectives and window effects down pat and it’s strange how contemporary they look on crumbling concrete. But more than mimicry, it’s the march of time and the recycling of artistic styles that seem to be Saari’s point. Simulated colored marble panels with inconsistent shadows, like those that once decorated Roman villas, are re-created right down to the sun-bleached color and rough-edged fragmentation of a ruin. As paintings they suggest that art hasn’t changed much. It is still used as decoration and still dealing in illusion.

Illusion and allusion are also the point of David Furman’s ceramic facsimiles of paint cans stuffed with brushes and blackboards dotted with artist’s tools. The works are drop-dead replicas in the tradition of Marilyn Levine and recall Jasper John’s pop art beer and paint cans cast in bronze. Furman similarly makes everything art by giving us the spattered tools of the artist’s trade in a simple transformation of object into art object.

This kind of work is appealing, both for the unpretentiousness of its subjects and for the neat way it transforms idea into matter. It can get redundant when chalkboard messages like “Trompe L’oeil Ceramics” identify what were looking at, but the blatant messages may just be part of Furman’s cards-on-the-table attitude. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 27).