Beverly Hills

Ernest Trova is one of the also-rans of modern art. For decades, he had trouble getting away from the iron grip of his artist idols. His paintings of nudes looked too much like De Kooning’s, his abstractions like Gorky and Miro whirled in a blender. Even the massive, high-shouldered figures Trova pieced together on canvas with leather and fur owed their artlessness to Dubuffet, with a brash American flat-footedness replacing the Frenchman’s aura of gritty mystery.

In the ‘60s, Trova developed his “Falling Man” series, a theme--pursued in various media--that has carried him through the past three decades. Along with a selection of earlier works, an exhibit includes a small army of recent large and small stainless-steel figures from this series. These android-like figures--loosely based on Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man--are armless, featureless and genital-free, with jutting pelvises and joints that swivel. Stomachs and heads are frequently sliced into drop-leaf compartments. Heads are caught in monstrous mousetrap vises; bodies are “bound” with crisply encircling carved lines.

Trova has provided a wishy-washy description of these figures (“contemporary man engaged in his many activities”). They are Space Age types, sleek and impassive, acted upon by presumably cosmic forces. Years ago, the idea must have appeared as excitingly futuristic as one of Tinguely’s self-destructive machines. But as works of contemporary art, the pieces come across as little more than gleaming metal and gadgetry to please the sci-fi crowd. (Hanson Art Gallery, 327 N. Rodeo Drive, to Oct. 31.)