La Cienega Area

Artist, teacher and writer Louis Fox makes a switch from figuration to contour drawings of cups, pitchers and tables done in a style almost directly lifted from the analytic Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Fox borrows their limited palette of whites, grays and burnished taupes, limning in a quick, linear form the fragmented contours of still-life objects. He first draws objects with charcoal on gessoed wood panels, then covers the compositions with a blackish wash that is rubbed and cracked to expose whitened ground and drawing. In this way he creates a shallow illusionistic space that holds a still-life mosaic. Simultaneous front and side views, shifting and overlapping dimensional planes vie for frontal position. Whether working in figuration or a rehash of Cubist abstraction, Fox’s theme is the structure that lies under his ostensible subjects. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Aug. 2.)