La Cienega Area

Much in Little: Mel Kendrick’s small sculptures are endearing formalist jumbles of interlocking form. Made from all colors of exotic wood and a yellowish bronze that mimics wood they make tidy little sculptural comments about form in space, structural support and the evolution of form. But as involved as they obviously are with all the self-referential musings of sculpture they are surprisingly buoyant. Fluttering and cutting wheelies through space they are anything but intellectually hamstrung.

A different sculptural approach to space is offered by John Torreano’s 12 herculean facet cut gems made of white painted plywood that tumble across the gallery floor. Large enough to tweak human scale but not big enough to confound it, they offer little else that’s involving but their able craft and what could be an unintentional self parody on art consumerism.

It’s impossible to read more into painter David Lloyd’s black and white drawings of fluid organic shapes than an effusive love for bubbling biomorphic pattern. They’re attractive in their high contrast imagery that’s sparked by the tactile pleasure of black charcoal ground over rough cream colored paper. But they’re still resoundingly mute. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to March 10.)