Santa Monica

A romantic cocoon surrounds Ciel Bergman’s newest paintings of huge irises. They stand amid pink watery landscapes daubed with touches of color and swirls of spinning line. Long horizontal canvases sliced by color into tall vertical segments, they frequently make clever plays with space but lean dangerously close to decorative sweetness.

What slows the drift into cloying affability is the artist’s casual, assured drawing and assertive elements like the dark and light circles in “Still and Still Moving.” On this canvas two pairs of orbs, white and black, red and green, hover like strange mirrored moons above an alien yellow horizon. Solid shapes and bold color are welcome anchors for form and meaning in the pastel never-never land that haunts so many of these paintings.

Dennis Leon’s plywood constructions are less dreamy, earthier landscapes. His impressive “Rockface” sculptures are towering pseudo-mountain ranges or rounded hunks of cliff face held together with screws and glue. Part stage-set illusion, part straightforward materials, they improbably convey a sense of dense mass as well as something of a painterly, tactile antiquity. Moving around the two free-standing wood mountain forms is like walking through the stacked space of a Chinese brush and ink landscape to touch the distant mountains. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to Oct. 9.).