Santa Monica

A Faulknerian sense of dread hangs over work by Oakland painter Leslie Lerner. Taking landscape as his point of departure, Lerner invests ominous dreamscapes with an immense sense of weight: In “A Secret Sign, I Suppose,” a spark of fire glows in a dark void, while flaming color pours from the windows of a burning factory in “A Chemical Accident.”

Bathed in unearthly light, Lerner’s pictures are in the tradition of mystical American realism that includes Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer and Charles Sheeler. Lush yet psychically ravaged, Lerner’s images of buildings going up in flame and churning rivers glow with a patina of melancholy and mystery. As in scenes that appear to us in dreams, each detail in these troubling tableaux seems fraught with significance.

Fire figures prominently in Lerner’s nocturnal landscapes which are for the most part unpopulated and rendered in a palette dominated by blues and greens. A young boy turns up in two canvases, one of which, titled “A Poor Boy Wrestling a Shark,” depicts a child alone in a small boat on a stormy sea. Ripe with Jungian nuance, it’s an enormously compelling image, at once terrifying and serene; the sense of loneliness and isolation that whispers through all of Lerner’s work lets out a blood-curdling scream in this image. As in work by New York artist Mark Innerst-- who paints in a similar luminous style--there’s a whiff of nostalgia about Lerner’s atmospheric visions, awash in Renaissance light as they are. He brings his work up to date, however, with the toxic, industrial fire that recurs like a stubborn virus in his pictures. (Marilyn Butler Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., to May 27)