La Cienega Area

After a good rain, colors, contrasts and contours seem to snap with clarity. This is the vision that Astrid Preston brings to her paintings of tree-lined roads, cityscapes, verdant woods and valleys. Whatever the subject or quality of light, Preston gives her landscapes the almost too-sharp look of a hallucination.

The daughter of architects, Preston began by making funny little houses from clear geometric shapes in aluminum. The work was about shape, line and form as well as symbolic meanings of shelter. Later she began painting familiar Santa Monica streets that we could not imagine anyone strolling on, followed by strangely beautiful houses painted at night that we could not imagine anyone living in.

Current works continue to push the landscape genre a few more notches away from strict realism. Large canvases are organized into broad sweeping roads that recede quickly toward the background, pulling us toward an unknown destination. Preston brings incandescent blue skies down to meet roads lined with dark bushes and trees. Palms mix illogically with pines, night light mingles with seering sun all in the same canvas. Many scenes are dotted with pockets of unexplained light, as if some person hiding in the scene were shining a lamp out toward the intruding viewer.

There are no overt references to geometry and architecture in these increasingly mature works, but you still sense structure in tight composition and graceful execution, and you still sense a Hopperesque comment on alienation in the lush lime-green knolls that invite us in only to hold us at arm’s length. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Sept 30.)