Is a Rose Still a Rose to Roberto Obregon?

Like many first-generation conceptual artists, Roberto Obregon began his career by rejecting painting in favor of photography and other media that seemed to be more analytical and less decorative. At Christopher Grimes Gallery, two works from the 1970s, two from the 1980s and 11 from the 1990s outline the contours of Obregon’s oeuvre, revealing that the systematic nature of his early work has long since become a style all its own--as decorative as painting if not as sensual.

In 1974, the Colombia-born, Venezuela-based artist stopped making paintings of flowers and started making sequential photographs that document a cut rose’s gradual transformation from barely open bud to full blossom to withered lifelessness. Next, he pulled every petal off another rose, assigned each a number, lined them up in rows and made a tidy watercolor of their orderly arrangement.

Most of Obregon’s recent works are color photographs of similarly dissected roses or the petals themselves, glued sequentially on large sheets of paper or in books whose accordion-like pages fold out in long sheets.

With the patience of a saint (or the mechanical activity of an assembly-line robot), he continues to arrange dried rose petals in series that move from the largest outermost ones to the smallest innermost ones.

As a spinoff, he also cuts the silhouettes of petals from sheets of black rubber. A set of 14 greatly enlarged petals covers one wall. Hanging opposite is a much smaller diptych, from the left side of which actual-size shapes have been cut in a random pattern.

In the rear gallery, Obregon has printed the word “rose” in seven different languages and typefaces on colorful vinyl appliques that have been stuck to the wall. All of these pieces lack the earnest observation of his earlier dissections of single roses.

As inessential embellishments of a once highly focused project, they demonstrate that conceptual art, like other styles before it, has entered its mannerist phase.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.