La Cienega Area

Ellen Phelan’s gray, misty landscape paintings are haunted. In the nearly colorless fog that muffles each image specters huddle, disguised within the hulk of trees or the fuzzy bulk of a distant hill. Yet with unsettling firmness they assert their presence, like figures seen through a steam-fogged window.

The figurative presence within the landscape makes these paintings more than monochromatic retreads of J. M. W. Turner’s style of “tinted steam” painting. The mist-shrouded landscape, which could so easily be simply a lilting atmosphere or painted-light gimmick, gains psychological strength from the near-tangible presence of silent watchers. On occasion, the presence is overdone, as in the face hovering in the middle of “Island in the River-River Test.” But when the figuration melts into the land, emerging only on the edge of awareness, as in the drippy green washed “Trees at Water’s Edge--River Test,” the effect is powerful. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to Nov. 11.)