Santa Monica

Fascination with light has led Peter Alexander from the black velvet depths of the ocean to the splashy horizon at sunset. His newest paintings unite sky and earth in a battle for luminous dominance as city lights crisscross the flat Southland basin under spectacular skies.

These paintings are a strange juxtaposition of painterly heavens and airbrush-spotted terrestrial street lights. Each glows with its own intensity, ignoring the other and setting up an interesting contrast of power between the randomness of the elements and the strict structure of the city boulevards. The city lights, for all the attention that Alexander can bring to their cobweb luminosity, quickly get boring. But the expressionistic sweep of descending cloud banks has staying power, especially in the freakish yellow rift of lightning in the twilight sky over “Saugus.”

Alexander has played on the edge of camp for so long that we expect his work to tweak the nose of the art elite who disdain schmaltzy sunsets and paintings on black velvet. These newest paintings, with their yellowish runway lights that may even glow in the dark, suggest the kind of cliche photo postcards you buy at the airport. Rather than being a negative, however, that play with commercial democracy is the sly salvation of the work’s romantic love affair with painted light. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to Nov. 18.)