Wilshire Center

Mel Rubin continues to make drawings and mixed-media constructions which salute our car-filled, cinema-saturated city. The zany cityscapes of clustered freeways, with pudgy automobiles caught in horn-honking traffic jams have a more somber, slightly sinister aura than previous work along similar lines, and there’s a notable shift of emphasis from humor toward clear structure and elegant form.

Rubin still weds fine art’s age-old fascination with illusionistic space to Hollywood’s love for bigger-than-life drama. The large scale “Stud City” starts out with a drawn two-dimensional view of a comfortable L.A. neighborhood at night. Done in atmospheric grays, blacks and whites applied dryly like a conte drawing, the tumultuous city sky holds a low-flying airplane. Trees, cars and city architecture depicted in two dimensions ooze out of their flat confines onto affixed wood panels shaped and painted to pick up the imagery lined within frames. Rubin adds yet another level of depth and pun by suspending a shaped and painted car some distance from the picture’s surface as if it were leaving the viewer’s space and entering the depicted scene.

For Rubin, our urban melting pot--part Disneyland ride, part palm-studded paradise, part caricature--shares something with the rarefied realm of art: both are places where divergent realities collide to create humor or mystery. Rubin expresses this idea by lumping a host of figurative styles in one work.

Even when Rubin tries his hand at straight compositional elegance, as in a suite of small charcoal drawings that turn freeway ramps into black-and-white design, we sense that Tinsel Town, with all its manic energy, can be a chillingly still and solitary place. (Jan Baum, 170 S. La Brea Ave. to Nov. 30)