Westwood

Long on style but lapsing into formula, Ron Blumberg’s palette knife paintings of Westwood during the 1950s and ‘60s have a lot in common with the environment they’re shown in this time around. Westwood is fast becoming a glass and marble extension of downtown architectural banality. Blumberg’s paintings take a similar hackneyed approach to rendering architecture.

The artist lays in buildings with small flat blocks of color and tone that in their faceting recall the impressionistic color landscapes Cezanne painted at Aix. But Blumberg’s plays with space and color seem like a stylized formula, pat and predictable. Fortunately, the same isn’t true of the more wild and wooly pieces of landscape painting that enmesh the fledgling city in a vast and rustic wilderness. In paintings like “Bel-Air,” a green hillside is a tempestuous sea of mark and bubbling color that percolates into the distant ocean while awash with the white flotsam of small rooftops. The unpredictable strength of rampant nature in this work and in “Fallen Tree” reasserts the power of painting to bring an emotional reality to life like an updated Van Gogh. That sensitivity and emotion is the spark missing from the downtown city paintings. (Feingarten Galleries, Westwood Place, 10866 Wilshire Blvd., to Dec. 31.)--S.G.