Wilshire Center

New York artist Anna Bialobroda makes painting into theater. In her dark and brooding glimpses from the aisle, the cast is playing to an empty house.

Each of Bialobroda’s paintings catch both a portion of endless rows of vacant seats and a piece of the illuminated stage or screen. In the most powerful images the movie screen forms a flat white ground where huge black and white faces stare out silently into the glowing, empty depths of the movie house. The canvases are long narrow verticals that compress the pieces of screen and seating into a tight edge of stacked fragments that frustrate depth and scale. The work also gives the sensation of peering though a crack in a door, adding a clandestine feeling to the theater’s emptiness.

Less challenging are paintings where appropriated images by Van Gogh and Rembrandt are collaged onto large movie screens and lightly blended in with colored paint. Without the shifts in scale or Bialobroda’s weird fragmentation the self portraits amid empty seats go static.

That can’t be said about “Spectacle� or “Bluff,� two deftly painted investigations into the psychological vulnerability of the artist/performer. As Bialobroda shifts the viewer from balcony to orchestra, she firmly grasps a performer’s sense of being at risk from a predatory audience. But surprisingly she makes that realization seem rooted in the viewer’s psyche, not the artist’s. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to July 29.)