ART REVIEWS

Sun, Surf and Paint: If you’re from anywhere else, you know that Southern California has a certain image. Right. Sun-drenched beaches dotted with young, tight bodies. Painter Susan Clover never has shaken that fascination with the fantasy, and this current batch of paintings of radiant young things soaking up the rays is about as perfect a pitch for the Southern California version of paradise as you can find outside a chamber of commerce.

Clover is a remarkable painter who rejoices in the vibrancy of bright color. Skin in her paintings has the prismatic delectability of a slicked-down Wayne Thiebaud. Hair is a tangle of unblended pure colored lines, water a glassy surface of impossible pure blue.

Strangely, even though most of these images suggest the casual framing of snapshots taken anywhere from Malibu to Newport, their sense of fiction is foremost. It’s not the forced fantasy projected by D.J. Hall’s smiling, sunny socialites. Rather, it’s the dreamy perfection of endless summer where adolescence lasts forever, the beaches are clean and unpopulated and smooth skin is as immutable as marble. Clover lets the vacuous quality to the teen fantasy stand without comment and that lack of moralizing (or parental nagging), here seems less an omission than a wish.

Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks (to June 29).