LA CIENEGA AREA

In his first local solo exhibit in seven years, Bay Area painter Willard Dixon presents landscapes, “real” and imagined, proving him a master of mood and painterly light, if not aesthetic innovation. Dixon ably and simply mines the traditional realist ethos. As a result the works are safely conservative, yet not without narrative and painterly interest.

Dixon is concerned with nondescript spots--back roads and railroad tracks, framed by telegraph poles, anonymous road signs and empty parked cars. He renders them in a soft, often brooding palette that imbues the faceless with a certain impending aura. In a series of imaginary landscapes titled “The Track,” large, circular traces are overseen by gathering storm clouds, as if the stage were set for the appeasement of angry gods.

Clearly Dixon’s work is metaphorical in intent, rhetorical in execution. The painter is the all-seeing eye who pieces the world together for the viewer. Much current landscape is concerned with dislocating this seamless relationship between author and consumer. The conceptually untainted, however, will probably find much to enjoy in these transcendental visions. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to May 8.)