La Cienega Area

Bruce Everett shows a dozen large California landscapes that start out as textbook Photo-Realism and graduate to real paintings with rich goopy brushwork and firm abstract surfaces. They are as nice a development out of the antiseptic photo-trace school as we’ve seen and they carry a convincing aura of ruminative autumn walks among local scrub oak with leaves crunching underfoot and dry ochre-velvet grass on the hillsides. The paintings are about life feeling good even as you get a little middle-aged and thick around the belly. You spot a sunbeam lighting up the curve on a road. It’s not the God’s-eye sunbeam of 19th-Century American landscape; it’s just a ray of light but it says the melancholy mystery of real life is enough.

Photographer Tim Bradley takes a sulfurous view of Los Angeles in a series called “Descent.” Its sooty-black prints of night time buildings are a trifle slick but it gets away with its stated intent to equate our precincts with those of Dante’s Inferno. A shot of a pickup truck carrying a framework that looks like a phantom church is especially haunting. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Oct. 1.)