Paintings Long on Texture, Short on Variety : Art: Alvaro Blancarte’s compositions are tired and formulaic, and his palette too uniform to inspire much thought.

The paintings of Alvaro Blancarte have a lulling effect--less from their placid beauty than from their numbing uniformity. The Tecate-based painter’s current show at the Iturralde Gallery (7592 Fay Ave., through Sept. 2) is titled “En Mi Ventana” (Through My Window), and consists of heavily textured works on canvas, paper and board.

Blancarte bases all of his work around a central motif of slightly undulating vertical lines, which often interrupt their course to bulge outward into knob-like protrusions. Occasionally, horizontals cross the verticals to form irregular grids. The format varies to include shadowy geometric shapes, as well as other, more concrete protrusions and a sporadic scribble.

The artist’s palette and composition don’t vary enough to keep this viewer’s gaze alert. From edge to edge of each canvas, Blancarte spreads the same mottled hues, all at the same middle range of intensity, neither pale enough to utter of ethereality nor sharp enough to cry of passion. Instead, they speak in unison in a cloying monotone. Dusty blue, soft mauve, lavender and the colors of sand, smoke and soot prevail, as do the many muddy tones in between. In isolation, or even smaller doses, Blancarte’s colors could exude a delicate beauty, but here, applied with such evenhandedness, they are as moving as wallpaper.

If Blancarte’s use of color seems less than fresh, his compositions, too, feel tired and formulaic. He sets the grid or grill of lines dead center in each image and surrounds it every time with layers of blocky brushwork and splattered color.

There are passages of great movement and animation to be found, such as the frantic, tight grid work central to “Las Siete Colas del Perro 13” (The Seven Tails of the Dog 13). The lines, scratched with urgency into a thick crust of gray and mauve, fray at the edges--a rare example here of tension and release amplifying each other. But further, beyond the stray lines of the grid, those same blocky brush strokes splattered with paint wrap the image in a neat package of predictability.

Blancarte exercises his imagination most in creating his textures. Mixing sand and marble dust into his paint, he then sculpts the ribs and rivulets of his abstract images. “En el Fin del Tiempo” (At the End of Time) makes the most of the organic quality of the textures. Here, Blancarte’s telltale lines have eroded, as if gnawed by wind and water to reveal a pocked and crusty underlying skin. In other works, too, irregular fissures and barnacle-like forms echo the composition of Earth’s own surface.

Among the most involving of Blancarte’s images here, however, is one of the most shallow in texture. “Mi Ventana Negra” (My Black Window) pairs two canvases with dark, nearly impenetrable surfaces. An irregular grid has been scratched into the scarred, charred-looking paint, mostly black with highlights of white and glimpses of red and pale yellow. The two canvases are mounted, a few inches apart, on a common support. The space between them, painted bright blue, throws a decorative stripe into the otherwise cryptic work, breaking what is for Blancarte an all-too-rare mood of mystery and intensity.