La Cienega Area

A lackluster show offers work by four artists at different stages of their careers. Alan Shean’s large, well-mannered abstractions seem to aspire vaguely to the status of vintage Diebenkorns. Formulaic and dated, these are canvases with with broad, tasteful applications of color, constellations of crisp lines and arcs, and small swipes of paint with tidily dissolving edges. The irreverent mind imagines what a terrific conceptual art piece Shean’s fatuously name-dropping resume would be in other hands: He used to pal around with Southern California art’s big boys and once painted on the backs of John Altoon’s rejects.

Don Nelson also has been on the Los Angeles scene for decades. His untitled mixed-media pieces on paper incorporate snapshots, watery paint and black scribbles in inscrutable and uncompelling ways. The repeated images of hands holding the photographs might be reminiscences of Wallace Berman’s “Verifax” collages, but the banal, suburban imagery that isn’t obscured by muddy paint (folks sunning themselves, a car in a carport) seems to lack a larger point of view.

Margaret Smith, an Englishwoman recently relocated in Santa Monica, paints pastoral acrylic landscapes that blotch and bleed like watercolors. Mette Petri is a young Dane who goes in for hot colors and improbable, deadpan themes. In “Arrival on Another Planet,” a black, masked head on a shapeless, dwindling body occupies a red, agitated planet along with two loopy stick figures. The results are rather like whatever New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast might produce if she were were deadly serious and wielded a paint brush. (Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Aug. 12.)