LA CIENEGA AREA

If Carlos Almaraz ever moves away, we will have lost a Los Angeles treasure. I say that because he’s one of the few artists here who knows how to paint passion.

Everything he does is not a masterpiece. He sometimes gets so churned up that his work self-destructs in the blast furnace of his energy and he often tries to pack too much into a mere rectangle. But when he’s on, Almaraz is terrifically good at turning up the heat of Latino-flavored urban life while sharing his own love affair with painting.

His current exhibition of expressionistic new work is at first disappointing. “Portrait of the Artist as Monet” is so hokey it’s embarrassing and an update of Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” is both chaotic and obvious. But not to worry; the central gallery contains a whole batch of good reasons to give thanks for Almaraz. “City Legends,” for one, focuses tightly on a blue female nude and two dark male figures striding through a city, as if propelled by demonic forces. “Buffo’s Lament” lends new poignancy to the theme of lonely entertainer, as a clown on stage melts into a red-violet curtain. Backstage, an artist with his back to us paints a nude model.

The artist as observer of exotic spectacles sits in a lower corner of “Yellow Morning,” recording a tumultuous surge of life rushing through the panorama before him. In “Homage to Still Life,” a barfly seems to be the spy in the house of perpetual amazement; he looks up at a group of bottles on a central mound surrounded by a fantastic array of floating objects and people. Though incredibly complex in their imagery and immersed in a pressure cooker of nervous line and vivid color, these oils are held together with domino effects and great arcs of action.

In a way, Almaraz is a fabulist who might be a cousin of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Almaraz’s visions are rooted in such realities as weekends on Broadway and picnics at Echo Park, but he removes them to a lush, tropical, hallucinogenic sphere. He also comes off as a mature artist who has by some miracle retained a sense of wonder. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Sept. 6.)