LA CIENEGA AREA

California artist John Nava has a precise love of the way things are structured, be they old Roman buildings or young American women. He paints these subjects carefully. Maybe one ought to say he draws . In either case, carefully is right.

The pleasure of looking at his large painted drawings of Doric arcades, brooding live caryatids and the occasional upside-down chair are very like the delectation offered by engineers’ plans. They are pristine and distant.

Broken surfaces of grayed paint permit a certain moodiness. The impersonality of a nude back seems to allow a juicier look tinged with the erotic.

How odd to find an art whose strongest emotion is a muffled longing for a return to the Academie des Beaux Arts so long scorned. Nava’s best work may be his smallest, a group of contour drawings of reclining nudes where tentative emotion becomes excitedly exquisite. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to March 16.)