Wilshire Center

Hannelore Baron’s collages and box assemblages are wispy, dark, runic things that seem on the verge of whispering great truths. The self-taught artist, who died in New York in 1987, liked to work with scrap materials because she was intrigued by the very fact of their survival over the years. Accompanying the uneven, fraying rectangles and strips of yellowed paper and cloth--often pasted down demurely, side-by-side, or neatly layered--are images of faceless, sexless figures and scrawny, illegible lettering.

The frequency with which striped cloth appears in these works wafts the suggestion of reminiscences of jails or jailers. Although Baron has written that she does not want her childhood experiences as a Jew in Germany in the 1930s to overshadow her work, it does anyway. The pathos that emanates from her work is undeniable. On a metaphoric level even the stains that mar the scraps of cloth begin to suggest blots on the psyche that the passage of time only intensifies.

Some of the pieces--which are all untitled--seem more fully realized than the others, and the essentially flat materials she uses seem by and large more suited to the collage than the box format. One of Baron’s most obvious--yet utterly personal--pacifist statements occurs in a collage in which the major elements are a tiny drawing of an upraised palm spotted with red paint and a vaguely triangular snippet of checked cloth that suggests a military decoration. With modest, almost invisible means, Baron evokes a much larger and blacker universe. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Inc., 357 N. La Brea Ave., to June 24.).