Art Review:

Cradled by soaring ceilings and a light-flooded rotunda at the Burbank Creative Arts Center Gallery, the works in Gus Harper’s “Signs of a Benevolent Universe” are given the room they need. Most of the 30-some paintings on display are the artist’s characteristic, large-scale oil renderings of flora and fauna — big, bright, mural-style pieces that swell with a distinctly Southern Californian optimism.

The objects of Harper’s gaze — giant pine cones, roses and citrus fruits — are cast in color schemes that run from understated (“Soothing Pine Cones”) to obscene (Citrus series). These isolated, simplified forms invite comparisons to Pop art, but Harper’s literal, earnest abstractions don’t seek provocation or irony. In some, the broad, meandering inner landscapes draw more likely comparisons to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

But where O’Keeffe excavated the sensual contours and hidden life of inanimate objects, Harper’s hyper-realism can feel lifeless and flat. This is ironic given the fact that these are giant, saturated, intimate portrayals of redolent fruit. But the aesthetic is commercial, and more evocative of a marketable product (like juice, for example) than the inherent vitality of fruits and seeds.

Seen together in the right space, however, the pieces create a lush visual forest. The beauty that emerges is not deep or deliciously complex, but persistent and unfailing.

Some pieces, like the anesthetic “Soothing Pine Cone” series, seem best suited for an institutional environment, while the “Melting Pine Cones” heighten the digital aesthetic. In the paintings of citrus fruits, bright colors are deployed with a waxy smoothness, like faces erased of their features, an occasional bone-colored crest providing the most obvious O’Keeffian artifact. At least in tone, these also recall the vintage ad art of California’s produce industry.

The largest and most expensive item in the show, “The Red Rose Grid Painting,” is also one of the strongest, the multi-canvas panel a Harper trademark. Along with the red pine cones, it is among the more presumptuous.

The exhibition also includes a few newer works from the artist’s “Poetics” series, done in acrylic on wood. These darker studies of female form with overlaid text were reportedly influenced by his travels through South America, and are a marked departure from the color and rhythm of Harper’s fruit — as well as from their commercial appeal.

As the gallery was closing on the first Saturday of the exhibition, a woman passed through the space, exclaiming, “These are so fabulously bright and vivid.” The gallery receptionist agreed, adding, “I hate it when we’re between shows and everything is just white.” The woman paused, taking in the assault of color and scale, the garden of magnified, ossified life forms. “But you really need a huge room.”

While certainly more than just something to fill the white space, the strength of Harper’s paintings emanates from the dilated background they create — and the viewer’s ability to step back and absorb the big picture.

About the writer BEIGE LUCIANO- ADAMS is a journalist based in Los Angeles, where she covers arts, culture, business and politics.