Santa Monica

In a handful of watercolors and graphic works, Jeanette Pasin Sloan renders all sorts of silver vessels--wine goblets, bowls, platters--with photo realist snap. As if it weren’t hard enough to coax the fragile, transparent personality of watercolor to behave like obdurate metal, Sloan also takes on the task of painting in the cacophony of ambient reflections picked up on vessels’ shiny surfaces.

In “Emergence” there’s a tour de force silver pitcher across whose surface we see the reflection of a table draped in a striped cloth and an oddly elongated nude woman seated in a sunny room with windows bowing outward as they echo the curvature of the pitcher. In all the works Sloan cleverly pits the perfectly described silver containers against the distorted, fun house look of striped fabric, furniture, and other objects mirrored on the silverware’s irregular planes.

The formal challenge of reflected imagery and the philosophical twist of having reality copy itself on the face of a shiny object has tickled the fancy of realists since Van Eyck. In Sloan’s case, when the formal pyrotechnics subside--and this takes a while because her craft is solid--there is little else there to hold our interest. (Tatischeff Gallery, 1547 10th St. to Dec. 9).