Images of Home Life Shut Door on Sentiment

Bland middle-class interiors and unremarkable apartments commonly rented by college students form the backdrops of Kristin Calabrese’s nine large yet modest paintings at Gagosian Gallery. For better and for worse, the backgrounds of the recent graduate’s blase oils-on-canvas are their most promising element.

Nothing much happens in any of Calabrese’s competently painted pictures of barely lived-in domestic settings, which are rendered in color, black-and-white or some combination of the two.

Made over the last three years, these emotionally flat images of a cramped kitchen, a bare breakfast nook, a tacky den and a young girl’s bedroom (whose occupant has moved out long ago) outline the contours of two worlds: the boring comforts of the suburbs (in which aspiring artists are often brought up) and the cheaper, less protected urban spaces they inhabit as they begin to build lives and careers.

It is not surprising that the majority of Calabrese’s paintings feature halls, doors and entryways. Such transitional spaces give physical form to lives lived on the move, in which much is unsettled and many once-cherished elements get left behind as other, more promising opportunities open up.

Less successful is Calabrese’s insistence on personalizing the mundane rooms her paintings otherwise lay out with cool detachment.

Polaroids of friends taped to a wall, exhibition announcements stuck to a refrigerator and messages scrawled on a card table’s top or into a bedroom wall detract from her works’ unsentimental air, transforming a potentially interesting scrutiny of one aspect of American blandness into an autobiographical exercise at once insufficiently developed and cloyingly cute.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Jan. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.