La Cienega Area

Big skies, flat land and the theatrical effects of weather and time of day offer New Mexico-based painter Elen Feinberg ample room for variation. Her dry, careful technique cross-pollinates the 17th-Century Dutch trick of indicating distance with skinny bands of dark and light color and the 19th century’s love of soul-inspiring atmospheric turbulence.

In some scenes, Feinberg backs up to let the viewer see the ledges of the windows letting in these views. Spaced at careful intervals are a variety of simple, presumably antique, bowls and vases. Suddenly a rectangle’s-worth of landscape is no longer timeless but hitched to a late-20th-Century notion of an ancient world of Euclidean purity and serene rootedness.

One twist on this theme is “Eudaemonia,” a painting of a sharply shadowed orange room in which arrangements of colorful little geometric shapes serve as Post-Modern accessories and a window introduces a lovingly rendered scrubby landscape. The interior may be intended as a fastidious, man-made equivalent of the natural order of nature, but it comes across as rather too precious. (Mekler Gallery, 651 N. La Cienega Blvd., to May 28.)