Santa Monica

In each of Patti Oleon’s rather amazing oil on canvas paintings she presents a centrally placed museum artifact executed with tour de force verisimilitude and sharp focus.

One canvas features an ornate silver 17th-Century statue of a tiny nude on a reindeer mount, another a precious glass box, yet another a gilt eagle crouched on flowing ribbons of gold. Oleon paints these complete with the exacting detail and Technicolor reflective surfaces of a well photographed magazine ad.

As if exhumed from the dusty shelves of a museum’s decorative arts department, each of these objects d’art are isolated and centered on a large canvas, pressed flush to the picture plane and suspended in front of an obscure shallow space. In the odd, hard to decipher middle ground, Oleon places things like a row of china swans duplicated in bands above and below the composition, or tile floors whose patterns repeat illogically, or exotic hanging ornaments that drop into the composition from above and below.

This imagery is worked to have the hazier focus, sculptural contours and atmospheric handling we associate with a painted, hand limned image. A further “order” of image making is provided by strange areas of checkerboard pattern deftly worked to look like bands of illuminated light.

It soon becomes clear that Oleon’s complexity isn’t baroque fussiness for its own sake, but intended to make a point. By using the high contrast tones of newsprint or black-and-white TV, by serializing images of objects we hold precious precisely because they are unique and tooled by hand, by setting up bizarre tricky spaces that force us to decipher what is real and what is fake, and by wrapping the whole snappy package in remarkably dexterous painting, Oleon reaffirms the special place of painting in an age when high tech manufacturing has all but obliterated any traditional, sane notion of artistry. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to Nov. 3.)