Wilshire Center

The flat, somewhat bland paintings of Austrian artist Alois Mosbacher are a curious blend of the mundane and the erudite. The images are common but skewed just enough to seem cryptic: pink lilies with stems laid out like four points on a compass; bunches of flowers with stems welded into a single base; a petrified Christmas tree that looks like a piece of flint. But what at first appears to be somewhat naive representational painting, ultimately resolves into a conceptual foray into representation itself. It is however, a slow resolution.

The work’s underlying rationality seems to wait in unhurried detachment for the viewer to begin to wonder why the artist has pulled all these items together. Eventually the faceted gems, pretty flowers and pieces of bright orange coral seem to demand that the viewer consider these natural elements as emblematic problems to be solved, not simply as representations.

The artist gently prods the mental process along by making the solitary images only partly satisfying. The unsophisticated paint handling and limited tonal range reject lengthy involvement. Soon it seems imperative to know the significance in an oversized piece of coral sitting on top of a flat gray landscape. In canvas after canvas this kind of juxtaposition places objects symbolic with life against a conflicting association with stasis or fossilization. At last we are left with the poignant realization that Mosbacher’s subject is not real life. It’s the separate, frozen reality of the image. (Turske & Whitney Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Dec. 20.)