Wilshire Center

Jan Groover has declared that “Formalism is everything” and seems determined to prove it’s possible to use photography strictly in those terms. Her staged and color orchestrated photographic still-life images use what could be called industrialized genre set ups. Cool and sterile, they give the impression of alluding to classic still life painting, but most are pointedly devoid of its usual underlying symbolism. Instead, like prize-winning window dressings intended to sell ambiance, the arrangements of the gray painted bottles and pieces of architectural bric-a-brac are heavy into composition, dark and light effects and calculated color. Only when the vibrancy of ripe apricots, pears and asparagus is added to the bleak gray setting does the still life whisper about artifice versus reality. But in this context, where form dominates substance, we hesitate to accept the whisper as more than just another semblance masquerade.

Philip Tsiaras’ metaphoric head containers are as visually rewarding as they are rich in innuendo. In his hands the simplified form of the human head can undergo transformations that make its emptiness and “stuffed full of information” reality sad but entertaining. But Tsiaras seems to be grappling with new abstractions in two new large paintings that lack his faceless head’s usual power. “Split” is the most interesting, displaying a spark of promising duality. (Richard Green Gallery, 834 N. La Brea Ave., to June 17.).