Santa Monica

Dennis Farber’s art is like those grade school projects where you scribble a design in crayon, cover it with a thick coat of paint, then scratch through the paint to reveal patches of the image below. Farber uses photographs--of crowded boardwalks, vacant lots, urban skylines--for the lower layer, while gold leaf serves as the surface coat. The metaphor here is easy to decipher, and Farber’s images read as inquiries into the dichotomy of the ideal vs. the real. Gold leaf calls forth all sorts of sacred associations and represents the divine; photographs, of course, represent the real, and Farber’s combination of the two suggests that dirty reality will inevitably bleed through whatever fragile veil of beauty one attempts to impose on it.

Also on view are minimalist sculptures by Susan Venable that look as though they belong in the corporate headquarters of AT&T.; Steel grids sprouting crops of copper wire, the work is described in a press release as “an exploration of the relationship between surface and structure,” but looks more like the guts of a disemboweled computer. Lacking both the formal classicism of first rate Minimalism, and the invigorating trashiness currently in vogue with the avant-garde, Venable’s work is pretty much adrift in its own orbit. (Maloney-Butler Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., to May 6).