Wilshire Center

Layers of Imagery: Painter Judith Simonian’s works have incorporated both a dreamy sort of realism and a dematerialized, pattern-happy treatment of form. The Los Angeles artist, who now lives in New York, peers at landscapes through the linear tracery of wrought-iron fences and merges recognizable painted images with abstract patterns of ceramic tiles. The thinness of the painting surface suggests either a fragile contemporary world liable to disintegrate or a distant universe perceived with difficulty through layers of imagery.

In “Population,” black and gray jabs of paint reassemble themselves as birds flying above a promontory. Painted with a miniaturist’s care on top of the fresco-like landscape--all milky blue and chalky yellow--a tiny bundle of scrolls tied with a red ribbon reinforces the feeling of having uncovered a passage of antique art for which we no longer possess a context.

Tiles are clustered together in “The English School” three-dimensional objects filling in the severe outlines of what appears to be an International Style building lurking behind a cozy, typically English structure in the foreground. Scattered in the trees, individual tiles remind the viewer of Mondrian’s transformation of natural imagery into patterns of squares. Ultimately, the tiles reinforce Simonian’s stress on the underlying patterns of objects, whether seen close-up or glimpsed after details have been eroded by time. (Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., to March 10.)