La Cienega Area

Kevin Larmon’s still-life paintings come complete with a tidy little bowl of fruit, but are at heart abstract, conceptualist attacks on the vagueness of art. The images, which suggest bird’s-eye views of table tops, are flat rectangular layerings of washy color or dark varnish that lay like a semitransparent tablecloth over Old Master’s art reproductions that peek out along the edges.

In the center is a small bowl of fruit--pure shapes occasionally leaning toward trompe l’oeil exactness. Spotting the “cloth” are rings from coffee cups and paint cans, spills and pencil scribblings that mimic the canvas as repository for happenstance and veiled art history. Not surprisingly, this painting-on-a-soiled-napkin approach to image-making has a stubborn, subversive edge.

Not all the points Larmon makes are fresh. He replays some of modernism’s favorite old tunes about paintings being objects as he balances canvasses on blocks of wood or lets them recline on the floor like sloping, truncated desk tops. All the posturing seems a little forced and obvious when the point is made more simply by the overhead perspective of the image.

What makes Larmon’s paintings noteworthy is their solid art historical vocabulary. Like the dinner guest whose parody of elaborate table manners mocks the cultured refinement of the host, these works play upon historical still-life painting to assert how unfulfilling and meaningless painting can be. Larmon dishes up innuendo masquerading as mark and makes obscurity the point of all the fuss.

(Michael Kohn Gallery, 313 N. Robertson Blvd., to Nov. 25).