Wilshire Center

For most of her career Susan Hall has painted and airbrushed resonant objects with the mystery single scenes recalled after a long and fretful night of dreaming--mirrors, lone trains, moonlit nights. In current works she achieves the result with a technique that closely parallels the way dreams can seem both blindingly portentous and utterly banal.

Layer upon layer of bright underpaint in acid yellows, peacock blues and magentas is scratched and scored before adding the next smooth finish so that an accidental texturing seems locked in amorphous space. She stains the bright fields with black oil wash or charcoal, achieving the luminosity of a full moon covered over by sooty clouds. All but concealed in the darkness are little hazy sailboats, canoes with lonely rowers, single bathers wading in murky waters. Letting just enough of her jarring Crayola colors show through, Hall achieves images that seems locked somewhere between the hyperreality of altered consciousness and what T.S. Eliot called “death’s dream kingdom.” (Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., to June 24.)