Signs of L.A.

Artists, writers and other sentient souls from outside the region have taken strange pleasure in looking at Los Angeles as a kind of alien cultural landscape. Outsiders enjoy viewing the city as a peculiar place that could as easily be a mirage in the desert as a place made of flesh and concrete.

Don’t count painter Robert Stewart among the ranks of L.A. bashers.

His paintings, now showing at the Orlando Gallery, show an avowed appreciation for the clean lines, chiseled geometry and also the kitschy resonance of signage in the urban world.

Relying on a simple but effective mode of realism, he seeks exoticism and intrigue in the rambling backyard that is L.A.’s urban sprawl.

Naturally, such a focus logically includes imagery of road lore. “Dole” takes its title from the “DOLE” advertising on a truck passing overhead on a freeway, the anchor--or protagonist--in the composition.

Said freeway is the horizontal element in a tangled matrix of roads, a reality Angelenos are well-acquainted with. Rain-slicked pavement and gray wintry air casts a wet haze over the scene, a layer of mystery.

In “101 North,” the weather is clear and the composition bracing in its ironic simplicity. A 101 Freeway sign, a modern talisman for locals, is flanked by two palm trees and on- and offramps aligning themselves to an odd sense of symmetry.

Here, Los Angeles is reduced to an image of clean-scrubbed, drowsy arcadia.

On the other hand, Stewart’s strongest paintings run counter to an appreciation of the city in its current state.

He avoids architecture of the post-Gehry, post-strip-mall L.A. and instead gazes with longing at vernacular architecture of vintage storefronts.

It’s a preexistential world in which French dip sandwiches are hawked rather than gorditas or Wolfgang Puck’s latest offshoot.

Almost by reflex, we think of Edward Hopper’s signature mix of sentimental reflection and despair in looking at some of Stewart’s images of unpeopled snippets of old architecture.

Old eateries like “Philippe’s” and “Coles,” both proudly proffer their sandwiches on signs with an antique grace.

These paintings are lovingly detailed, admiring of the frank simplicity and lost romanticism of mom ‘n’ pop operations on the urban scape. They celebrate and mourn the passage of that slice of American experience.

His sidelong view of Chasen’s represents a different kind of bygone epicurean landmark. Viewed from a parking lot across the street, the fabled restaurant to the stars appears almost as an elite and impenetrable fortress. A white monolith, it looks like a temple to aristocratic taste buds and hobnobbery.

As seen in this small sampling of paintings, L.A. has it all: pampered socialites and freeway-hypnotized travelers, endearingly funky old haunts and this week’s hangout. The unstated subtext in this art is that we’re also a city that, more than most places, loves to peer into its collective civic/psychic navel, part of which we can see by looking at the freeway system.

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IF HORSES WERE WISHES: In the other half of the Orlando Gallery, and a world away, Marilyn Logue’s paintings refer to the imagery of animals as interpreted through cave paintings and pictographs, then further filtered through her own contemporary art perspective.

As with the art of her ancient models, the animals are abstracted, simplified--sinewy horses, bulls, rams--that become fodder for her own expressive means, mixing paint with sand.

Titles like “Finished,” “Search” and “Constant” help tip us off to her process of personal and emotional exploration, beneath-the-surface particulars.

In other words, her art is all about introspection, and only passingly about horses.

BE THERE

Robert Stewart and Marilyn Logue, “Lost Balance,” through Friday at the Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Tuesday-Friday; (818) 789-6012.