Santa Monica

John White, who recently announced his retirement from performance art, has been exploring more traditional forms--sometimes with maddeningly elusive results. A series of “Kern Valley Landscape” paintings offer repeated spiraling tornado-like scribbles and vertical bands covered with a hard-to-decipher palimset of images that might be palm trees, buildings, bridges and air planes. In this curiously stage-like setting, patches of metallic paint adhere to vast backdrops, short flights of steps are zapped by the trajectory of a crackling line and bunches of orthagonals splinter shallow floors.

A long, narrow trio of “Kern Pictographs” comes more clearly into focus. Cutting out bits of black-painted board to make a spare alphabet of black-and-white lines and solids, White allows the viewer to decode a restless universe of objects: receding freeways, telephone poles, a jumping fish, a plane taking off, lighted windows on a skyscraper, a mountain poised over its logical inverse, an upside-down hat.

A group of “River Debris” mixed-media paintings--clumps of tiny toys and gears covered in bronze or silver paint and interspersed with panels of White’s illegible images--have a dank and inscrutable air.

Zizi Raymond, a young artist making her Los Angeles solo show debut, pairs up well with White. Her eccentric black assemblages and fastidiously stylized neo-Bauhaus collages have remarkable presence, even when they appear to reach for meaning beyond their grasp.

In “Milk Fed,” a ladle freighted with test tubes of a white substance (powdered milk) is attached to the back of a child’s chair tilted back on its rear legs and covered with tar-like viscous black paint. Above, an udder-like piece of metal is suspended on a plumb bob. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to Oct. 8.)