Santa Monica

Like falling leaves--but also amusingly like ‘50s light fixtures and fabric designs--the translucent long ovals and circles and egg-shaped drifts of color layered on top of each other in Donald Traver’s large paintings are mighty seductive. Named for places in New York’s Hudson River Valley, these works translate the stems and pods of nature into a wry loveliness. Calder’s mobiles come to mind, as do Miro’s paintings and maybe even the pristine, light-filled quality of the Luminist branch of American landscape painting.

But the combination of artless overlapping, amusing structural devices and unseen light sources that rim edges with sprays of light is Traver’s own sweet treat. In “Overlook,” bright yellow ovals bunch up busily all over the place except for a vertically oriented central black strip on which a bevy of colored circles seem to have been dropped from a great height. This is the young New York artist’s first Los Angeles solo show.

Also on view is a revolving array of brash, look-at-me pieces by gallery artists (to Aug. 31). Three tartly conceptual works gathered under the title “Virtue Systems” are the work of Lynn Aldrich. In “Faith,” a cardboard carton sealed with 25 rolls of tape sits on top of a plastic pedestal. “Hope” consists of an upside-down array of crutches attached to what looks like an ironing board top attached to the wall. “Charity” is a 5-foot pile of cut-out felt hearts.

Joe Clower’s enigmatic, perhaps sexually referenced “Chistes y Chicas” (Jokes and Girls) is a big painting of a wrench suspended in a blue sky above a red field sown with Spanish women’s names. Kirk Miller’s “Competition Stripes” is a hooked-up set of skittering, twinkling brake lights. In “Nature and Industry,” Elizabeth Bryant sprinkles lace silhouettes of buildings and planes and folkish patterns over a monumental black-and-white photogrammetric silhouette of a man. Other work is by Matt Mulligan, Peter Seidler, Stephen Berens, Peter Halley, Gregg Fleishman and Andy Warhol. (Krygier/Landau Contemporary Art, 2114 Broadway, to Aug. 12.)