Santa Monica

In this age of mass media and reproductions, context and originality are the nettlesome subjects taken up by two of the artists in a four-person show. Roger Hankins appropriates and manipulates what he calls “hotel paintings�--those tacky arrangements of pears, grapes and bowls printed and sold by the hundreds, then hung to haunt us from the walls of cut-rate inns. Hankins brushes or trowels crusty daubs and skeins of orange, red or multihued paint over and through the still lifes so that only bits of the hotel realism show through. It’s clear he’s toying with our threshold for high vs. low art, but some of his hands-on embellishments look so extemporaneous that it’s hard to tell the low from the high and whether he is spoofing or being serious. The best work, “All Four,� leaves one solitary piece of fruit floating in a molten reddish maelstrom, like a planet spinning out of orbit.

Another painter, Farhad Moshiri, also emphasizes man-made brush work for less than straightforward ends. His large paintings paradoxically use the artist’s hand to depict ever recycling, anything-but-original visual fodder, like the Paramount Pictures mountain or the printed credits that roll past when our movies and soap operas end.

The tone switches to more traditional painterly concerns in Adam Ross’ small horizontal wood panels. Painted with translucent, drippy oil washes in rich blues and deep blood reds, the panels are topped with high gloss veneers that lock color, line and moody atmospheric effects deep inside varnished surfaces. Refreshingly free of unclear ideological posturing, making no statement other than the elegance that comes from clean craft, the wall mounted constructions of Dean DeCocker balance gracefully arched raw aluminum slabs over delicate lattices of unpainted wood. In “Flat Top,� an aluminum shaft pierces the center of a doughnut shaped wheel painted to look like trompe l’oeil concrete. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to July 22.)