La Cienega Area

At first Connie Jenkins’ new rock paintings and Galen Hansen’s Neo-Expressionists drawings look like one-gulp works, but they get better on contemplation.

For years Jenkins has painted strewn rocks and surf in Photo-Realist style claiming they symbolize things like everybody killed in Vietnam. This group is more literal. Human bones lie scattered among fields of rock. Right. Post-ecological disaster memento mori. Time for lunch. Maybe not. Did everybody flee to the desert to die? Why would they do that? Maybe it used to be a beach that dried up or just general post-atomic devastation. Enigma keeps you looking long enough to realize that the sterile paint handling masks careful abstract composition. These paintings are not a bust.

Galen Hansen’s drawings are so full of Neo-Ex cliches, all you want to do is declare a ban on leaping dogs. That headless man with a fish for a tie looks like pure Magritte. But it’s not. It just has that sort of inevitability and special quality of stating the obvious in a resonant way. Hansen says those birds are magpies but they look like penguins. Penguins in a tree is an irresistible idea. The drawing’s a bit wobbly, but there’s a wacky frisson at work here. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Oct. 9.)