Wilshire Center

The old saw that a painting is a window is still a surprisingly stimulating observation in the paintings of Ernest Silva and Robert Gil De Montes. Silva’s interior rooms, decorated with brushy leaf-and water-patterned floors or walls are cut open by rough “picture window” paintings. The framed images form a neat, round robin kind of internal reference as the artist’s studio becomes an exploration of the artist as mythical figure, “rogue” outsider and expressive volcano pumping up a fluid unconscious from the depths of the painting and the artist’s own fertile mind.

Silva’s paint handling is quick and powerfully direct. When he slaps it over furniture sitting in front of a similarly painted “Lighthouse” canvas, there is a weird blurring of boundaries between the real and the allusive. That visual and conceptual fuzzing doesn’t have the same intellectual complexity as the paintings, but the simple symbolism of a hollowed out orange life raft caught in swirls of blue bent willow has its own poetry.

Robert Gil de Montes’ paintings are not so much windows as surrealist theaters with painted curtains framing symbol-rich landscapes. It is tempting to view the paintings strictly from their ethnic roots, because the artist is represented in the County Museum of Art’s current “Hispanic Art in the United States” exhibition. But to do so would be to miss the strength of the Gauguin-esque color and the lusty plant life in “Black Lake.” And it would ignore the artist’s enticing ability to use such bold color to subtly solidify space so that the various folk art monkeys, masks and transparent leaves fuse with their surroundings. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 25.)