La Cienega

Christophe Boutin, a French artist working in Los Angeles, is engaged in a curious attempt to yoke a couple of opposites: ponderously symmetrical lead- and gold-covered wooden rectangular framing elements and biomorphic drip-covered paintings executed in a muted and deliberately restricted palette. The results manage to be neither visually satisfying nor intellectually provocative.

Arranged in massive steplike formats, the lead and gold blocks suggest an inert, would-be grandeur. The canvases look grimly programmatic, like a humorless attempt to prolong the legacy of Clyfford Still. Some of these pieces also contain arrangements of three-dimensional gold letters--some placed upside down or on their sides--none of which seem to spell out a legible message. Another group of works--executed at Boutin’s 71 rue Blanche address, as the titles proclaim--involves pairs of gold foil-wrapped letters of the alphabet (the foil is partially peeled away, like boxed chocolates ransacked by idle hands) superimposed over brown-toned photographs, mostly of male heads and wire fences.

There might be issues of identity or language buried somewhere in this piece, but Boutin isn’t giving anything away. His fondness for gold--which also surfaces in a lone bell glass-encased sculpture and in another piece containing multiple copies of the gleaming invitation card for the show--comes across as little more than a vacuous fascination with luxe. A viewer thinks of ormulu objets in a pretentious apartement , and fails to see the rigor behind the gesture. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to July 1.)