La Cienega Area

Ruben Kocharian’s paintings are dense, detail-packed still lifes and pictures of everyday life. Rich with the descriptive texture of blistered paint, papery onion skins and crisply folded cloth, these genre scenes have a closely observed intensity. Yet the way the paint thickens up to mimic the subject’s texture frequently knocks the images back into unreality as the artifice of the illusion is blatantly underscored.

Kocharian further emphasizes painting’s illusionistic tricks by cramming as much into a shallow picture plane as possible. Scenes like the verdant “Lily Pond” seem about to pour from the surface of the canvas as leaves, water and vegetation expand into every square inch of pictorial space. Less congested still life images have an equally compressed vitality despite the torpidity of the carefully arranged fruits and vegetables. Frequently, as in “Pomegranate,” the background color is so strong it seems to bump against the fruit in a mad rush to be out front. In “Against the Wall,” the texture of the background vies with the potted plant hung from it for primacy in the picture’s shallow space.

Kocharian’s paintings are so quiet about the way they deconstruct elements of representational painting it’s easy to overlook some of the painterly commentary. But in “Buddha” we get some help. The flattened space and the way the picture traditionally functions as a window is deftly summed up by the silent statue sitting on a window ledge. And of course the painting is being displayed inside the gallery’s front window. (Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 22.)