La Cienega Area

Karla Klarin’s pale, paint-sloshed constructions push into real space yet demand to be taken as paintings. She stacks thin forms like playing cards fighting perspective illusion with an allusion to real depth. Her figures have Picasso’s love for fragmented figures and flat color faceting. Faces hang like masks in front of flat painted torsos; legs are separate, abstract pillars; arms, flat shapes that pop up or recede.

As Klarin reworks Cubist space in cookie-cutter bas-relief, her still-life paintings of studio clutter begin to suggest the illusionistic foreshortenings of John Okulick. This carries over to dull portrait studies of friends and family that convey only a bland vagueness about the sitter. But in the vigorous sauna-nude paintings, everything comes together.

These elegant and forcefully painted figure studies are piecemeal constructions of abstracted shapes that drown real depth in watery gesture even as the layered fragmentation fights to reemphasize it. The addition of a collaged cloth towel, flattening space by underlining the painting’s artificiality, is a nice touch. Color too gets a boost, running from hot to cool like a color-graded thermometer. But it is the figures, playing off the painting’s tips and dips that make the shallow nod to painted space worthwhile. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Nov. 11.)