La Cienega Area

In his best paintings--like “Greek Texture” and “Textures of Greece”--Marc Zimmerman suggests the look of sunstruck Greek towns with broad, irregularly configured patches of crisp texture and bright color heightened with fluent linear details. The ghost of Matisse may lurk in the black curves of a wire chair or the abbreviated lines of flowers in a pot, but it doesn’t overwhelm the genial spaciousness of the designs.

When Zimmerman stumbles, he tends to be working smaller, abandoning his tangy palette for ho-hum neutrals, loosening his grip on the sharpness of the textural contrasts and neglecting to give the abstract jig-saw shapes enough angular personality. In still other paintings, he pursues variants on this style that are sadly miscalculated. The medley of soft colors and shapes in “Greek Alley” comes across as bland and awkwardly rendered, and the cityscape, “Timeless Village,” is hard to distinguish from the cliches of tourist art.

Small-scale bronzes are Zimmerman’s most recent passion, but what he does with the medium is tepidly conventional. Reworkings of ancient architectural shapes--the ziggurat is a particular favorite--look as though they might just as well have been created 30 years ago. “Pyradine,” a dull-finished obelisk shot through with gauzy blue, has a rather more substantial and less fussy presence. (Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., to July 1.)