Wilshire Center

A Bow to Tradition: James Griffith’s paintings, which blend historic European landscape painting with botanical and formalist studies, are wonderfully dense and inviting. Each canvas contains a dark fragment of brownish atmosphere overlaid with a snip of chiaroscuro vegetation that’s been done with remarkable painterly quickness and accuracy. Panels of thick white paint surround and cut into this area of spatial illusion, simultaneously defining and isolating that conceit. A final layer of intellectualization is applied by a large, needle-fine incised plant form that cuts over both painting and white ground.

The nearly invisible linear plant shape, which suggests a stylized baroque stencil, deftly but gently unifies the flat white space with more traditionally painted areas of the canvas. It also adds a surprising amount of movement to the static geometry of the two opposing areas. Richly resonant with the traditions of painting from Rembrandt to Robert Ryman, each canvas seems to argue for a simultaneous exploration of realist and abstract formal concerns. Together the separate panels gain strength and fresh meaning from their improbable juxtaposition. (Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to March 31.)--S. G.