La Cienega Area

In the throes of conceptual and semiotic art, painters like Joe Andoe are viewed as taking a more traditional approach that’s seeped in the Renaissance tradition of recognizable imagery, lush brush work and a moral aphorism tucked in there somewhere. Often it’s tough to tell this work from pseudo-naive remakes of New Image art, but the Oklahoma-born Andoe is one of its more convincing exponents. Raised under the influence of strict religious training, Andoe studied the Old Testament and began his art career with paintings of lone doves and wreaths replete with religious symbolism.

His content hasn’t changed. This exhibition offers dark blackish brown grounds where isolated, robust tulips are formed by selectively removing pigment from a monochromatic background until flower and leaf materialize from fine-tuned modulations of stained canvas. He also reverses the process, making meditative expanses from transparent oil stain, then overlaying crisp, clear images of floating oak leaves, strawberry branches, encircled florals. Everything is covered with a deft film of varnish, giving works the feel of luminous Old Master paintings or decorative parquet inlaid in turn-of-the-century wood veneers. One untitled landscape is no more than an upper register of whites, a lower band of blacks, and a few brush marks that read as trees dwarfed by a vast, encompassing sky. These paintings are a good example of the difference between ethereal, sketchy work that looks amateur--or worse still, staged--and work, like Andoe’s, that stems from believable humility and a visionary stance. (Michael Kohn, 313 Robertson Blvd., to May 13).