LA CIENEGA AREA

For paintings that look serene, the quiet interiors of Bruce Cohen have lots of problems. His hard-edged, spare scenes of empty West L.A. funky-chic digs first recalled David Hockney. Cautiously painted still lifes therein seemed to echo--if not mirror--the recent work of Paul Wonner.

Well, at least this new group of 14 large untitled canvases has distanced itself from its influences by pulling in another one--the little Dutch masters of yore. Surely the best picture here is one that borrows Vermeer’s device of using light from an open window to throw the foreground into monumental shade, but even it fusses itself into an anxiety attack with too many little snippets of fruit and flowers on the table. It happens over and over. A pink tile sink in a far room bashes forth visually and suddenly looks like a rooftop through a window. A sunny morning scene is agonized by lumps of twisted bed sheets.

Properly done, these emotional and symbolic contrasts might be the art’s interesting expressive leitmotif, as when a gentle rose is posed against an exotic tropical landscape--the uneasiness of life in the artificial reaches of the Lotusland. The reason it doesn’t play like that seems to stem from problems that are basically technical. Cohen’s work lacks the enveloping sense of unifying light that is the glory of the Dutch intimists. He paints every detail in isolation with excruciating labor and stitches them together with a compulsiveness whose only real calm is that of someone trying hard not to come unglued. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to Feb. 4.)