LA CIENEGA AREA

“Moon of Alabama” has to be among the keenest titles ever given a painting. Local artist Kay Whitney took it over from an old Kurt Weill theater song and it exactly suits her work’s combination of turgid Teutonic blockiness and steamy exoticism. In her half of a two-artist show she paints tropical growth in extreme close-up using big choppy strokes to lay on paint in a range of fuchsias and purples that are currently so fashionable they can be found in a line of men’s shirts.

Whitney composes symbolic abstraction in a manner reminiscent of Marsden Hartley. Their inclination to turn pulpy plant-life into huge, ripped negative spaces and saw-toothed leaves has overtones of Mother Nature’s dual role as seductress and destroyer. Unfortunately, Whitney’s strong personal vision and technical accomplishment is cast in a Neo-Expressionist syntax so familiar as to approach anonymity.

As much, alas, must also be said of Miriam Smith’s big black-and-white abstractions. She, too, appears sincere and well schooled but her paintings slog along as if she were part of a lost patrol trying to wade out of the Neo-Ex swamp. One minute they remember the mad intensity of early Jackson Pollock and the next the primeval brooding of Anselm Keifer’s landscape. They are momentarily inspired but soon slip back into the muck of routine. (Eliat Gordin Gallery, 644 N. Robertson Blvd. to Wednesday.)