Wilshire Center

Looking at Darren Waterston’s atmospheric, virtually colorless landscape paintings is a bit like imagining familiar objects in knotholes. Silhouettes of waterfalls, mountains, trees and ghostly wanderers are conjured up through the alchemy of wood grain, thin washes of black and pale yellow oil paint, touches of graphite and veils of wax. The stately images sometimes seem calculated to evoke the ink paintings of Chinese masters--particularly in the long, thin scroll-like formats of two “Scenes from Purgatory and Paradise.” Several works have a darkly romantic, brooding quality created with liquid shapes and blurry points of light.

A rather fey 18th-Century air permeates “Portrait of a Plague” in which a transparent, all-white, elegantly attenuated male figure stands on tiptoe with his palms out and his face a mask of fear. In a trio of small, wonderfully resonant “Myth” paintings, blurry lights and elusive figures hint at major themes in the realms of politics, religion and magic. Deftly slipping in and out of memories of historical periods of time with the most sparing of illusory means, Waterston is already sui generis-- pretty impressive for an artist still in his mid-20s.

Alison Saar’s small folk art-style figures have the matter-of-factness of back fence gossip and the prideful toughness of lives that have endured stormy weather. Pieced together with bits of tin, chips of china and the sort of odds and ends you’d find in an old sewing basket, these wall pieces celebrate folks like “Jesus Jones”--a guy with a halo and stigmata on both hands, who also holds a cigarette and has a transistor radio stuck in his rolled-up shirt.

“Blue Plate Special” is a humorous way of describing Salome (with a rusted metal nude body and bright-red lips and nipples) carrying the head of John the Baptist on a plate. Saar’s approach is like vernacular religion. Pieces with no apparent religious references usually suffer in comparison. But in “Chilley Willie,” the image of a washboard musician--made with a real washboard and a row of thimbles--she translates the funky appeal of the music-making right into the heart of the work. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 10.)