Stylized Works Flowering With Familiarity

At Kohn Turner Gallery, Darren Waterston’s dark paintings of cascading flowers, dappled lights and feathery leaves look as if they might have something like languor in mind. In fact, their pleasures have to do with flexing the eyeball, with tracing the artist’s elegantly attenuated, sometimes impossibly refined line. This exercise makes it clear that Waterston’s skittishness is contagious.

No one could argue with the fact that this work is stunning. All that remains is the question of its meaningfulness, which is distinct from its meaning. But this is all but a moot question, because these aestheticized flights of fancy deify style.

As paintings go, they are poseurs, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if not for the Ross Bleckner problem. Flickering lights, somnolent colors, lonely flowers and tastefully scarred surfaces: It’s been done before.

And the resemblance is so unmistakable that, if Waterston isn’t going for irony or pastiche (which he isn’t), he may be making a big mistake. It’s been pointed out in his favor that he’s technically a better painter than Bleckner. But Bleckner has managed to infuse his style-turns with a deep melancholy that rescues the best--if not the worst--of his work from total vacuity. One wonders if, somewhere down the line, Waterston will manage to do the same.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Oct. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Translations: “Spleen (After Baudelaire),” an installation at Side Street Projects by San Francisco artist Elliot Ross, reeks of graduate student: It’s derivative, literal and not romantic enough to be eccentric, but too romantic to be indulged--even for those susceptible to the charms of callow youth.

The show is composed of a series of photographic constellations arranged around the artist’s English-language translations of nine Baudelaire poems. What this means is that Ross’ texts are interspersed with clusters of framed black-and-white images--dark stairwells, oblique views of Gothic architecture and close-ups of bulging eyes--that are appropriately haunting and/or lugubrious. As a further point of reference, photocopies of the corresponding poems in Baudelaire’s original French are propped up against the walls below.

I am not prepared to comment on the felicity of Ross’ translations, though the prize-winning edition of “Les Fleurs du Mal,” translated by poet Richard Howard, is a tough act to follow. But it doesn’t take much to see that the photographic translations, approximations or whatever you want to call them of everyone from Eileen Cowin and Victor Burgin to Fritz Lang, are particularly ham-fisted.

Admittedly, these artists make fine models. And more immediately, Baudelaire’s romanticism is seductive territory, especially come the fin de siecle, when artists of all stripes seem to be drawn to the beautiful, the horrific and the decadent.

Yet the trick, I suppose, is to reinvent the romantic, not to endlessly ape its historic forms and tropes. In “Sympathetic Horror,” Baudelaire writes of his unquenchable thirst for the obscure. Ross might do well to be a little more thirsty.

* Side Street Projects, 1629 18th St., #2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-0779, through Oct. 19. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.