La Cienega Area

Tone Fink is an Austrian who (judging by catalogue photographs) has done some amusing tricks with garment-like paper cutouts and the silly shapes of human body parts. But here he uses paper either as a surface for wispy painted abstractions or as the stuff of a purer-than-thou repertoire of Simple Molded Forms.

An untitled painting with a tangled blue background and a curving yellow shape tipped at each end with an unnervingly squishy pinkish impasto comes as close as any of the works in the show to Fink’s earthier anatomical interests. A bow-tie alights in the middle of a yellow, white and gray object with two squat legs in “Kunstschatztruhe” (art treasure-chest).

In his white-on-white three-dimensional paper pieces, Fink offers a cliched repertoire of basic forms (triangle, ovoid, hemisphere) and memories of real things (parted lips, the fan-shaped cookies that come with European ice cream) that don’t have enough spin to stand on their own.

Perhaps the best piece on view is “Schneebrett” (snow board), a painting that evokes a clear image in a gravely self-effacing way. Below a hopeful sliver of green the paper is torn into little flaps overpainted here and there with grayish white; the resulting texture and color suggest the grungy look of springtime slush. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to Jan. 5.)