LA CIENEGA AREA

At a hurried glance, Robert Zakanitch’s paintings look like the spawn of yet another arriviste young New Yorker being stylish and nonchalant. Ten big paintings enlarge patterns from 1930s rooming-house wallpaper and make them into decorative motifs loaded with nostalgia and irony. I just can’t stand another hipper-than-thou kid lounging around making style out of smirks.

Well, look again, that isn’t what you have.

Sure enough, a good soak-up scrutiny reveals that Zakanitch is a mature talent orchestrating trendy motifs into real honest-to-goodness paintings. “Merlin” starts as a bouquet of oversize pink flowers above a black-and-white checkerboard. It is quickly transformed into a field day for painterly virtuosity. “Graphite Vineyard” gives bunches of grapes the movement of carnival belly dancers.

Just about the time Zakanitch begins to feel more adept at choreographic detail than compositional conception, “Trouper” marches on, booming a visual bass drum that keeps chunks of space in solid relationship.

It is pushing one’s luck to begin to question the underlying originality of this work, or to wonder if it is not sometimes too witty for its own good. Wisdom rests its case on gratitude for some grown-up art. (Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, to March 9.)