In an uneven group sampling Los Angeles viewers have their first opportunity to judge some of Dwan Gallery’s New York contingent. Richard Baringer’s contribution is a curved Stella-derived optical panel of painted aluminum. A dazzling pair of repeated stripes, red and chartreuse green, zig-zag toward a compressed center point. The vertically dividing open slot between the two arcs and the yellow ochre flat areas used to fill out the rectangular format are unfortunate if necessary compromises.

The Arakawa lithographs of room plan blueprints are typically minor homages to the Duchamp method and

Robert Graham’s sculptures at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery are strange and individual works of Surreal fantasy. Now explicitly erotic, the tiny figures, six to eight inches high, modeled from pigmented beeswax, take part in curiously rare and memorable tableaux. Their most remarkable quality is their minuteness and the intense and demanding concentration directed to their realistic recreation. As examples, one nude is complete in detail to hair and eyelashes, and another sunbather sips a summer drink fitted out with a citrus slice and a straw. Impressive also is the wide range of materials used

In his new Leaf Series of painted reliefs at the Felix Landau Gallery, executed during the last three years, James Jarvaise follows through in a direction begun in his Hudson River series of oils. The show points out also how unnecessary was his departure to Spanish (Bay Area?) figures in 1963. Recovering lost ground, Matisse reappears as an influential factor, but now crowded out by a host of other masters; Arp, Calder, Gorky, and Marca-Relli.

The reliefs are sawed and epoxied plates of shaped aluminum staggered in and out of a four-inch deep space and coated with a base of white enamel. There

Bernard Cohen has at least temporarily set aside his fragile, semi-Surreal figural mode (represented here last year in a series of drawings) to experiment in lyrical color and abstract shapes and patterns. His twenty-two tiny acrylics (about 4'' x 6'') at Ceeje. are surely conceived more in the spirit of experimentation than as matter for lasting preoccupation. They obviously call for close-range scrutiny, and one is reminded, if not for the first time, of the astonishing power of scale alone to control modes of visual apprehension. There is a certain immediate attractiveness in these delicate

Hard edges—even in the overfamiliar sense of the term—are neither dead nor dying. They are vibrantly alive in eight new wall sculptures by Clark Murray at Nicholas Wilder. These are of rolled steel, varying from approximately eight to ten feet in length, and are monochromed with red, orange, blue, green, yellow or black sprayed paint. Though they are closely related to Murray’s modified wedge shaped pieces that were shown here last year, there are a few crucial differences. First, the earlier glossy finish has been toned down to a uniform matte surface, which eliminates distracting reflections

Robert Chuey’s impressions of a recent visit to the Swiss Alps, in the form of fourteen energetic, Expressionistic oil paintings and a number of drawings, are at Fleischer/Anhalt. In eleven of the large oils, Chuey works for the first time in black and white. They all deal with groups of crystalline planes and surfaces: even areas suggesting the flow of glacial masses are densely broken up. Landscape at Eiger is the most remarkable of these, having a boldness and all-over drive that the others lack. The angular forms seem in some places to push upward, and in others to tumble diagonally down

At Ankrum, northern California sculptor Melvin Schuler is having his first L.A. exhibition. He works in wood, mostly black walnut waxed to a handsome finish, and builds both freestanding monoliths (usually with more than one component) and bolted constructions. They range in height from about four to nearly seven feet. The monolithic pieces show a strong feeling for proportion and balance, or imbalance, but apart from a few really engaging ones in which solid, roughly squarish chunks are unevenly superimposed in heavily precarious stacks (Tall Form), they tend to call too much attention to their

Alex Katz, at the David Stuart Gallery, is a summary surface painter and easily contented. Entirely derived, he evidently owes his reputation to his talents as an “in”-group portraitist. The flat tone modeling, along with his photographic inspiration he owes to a tradition as old as Manet, and the enlarging of the heads more specifically to Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The emphasis is on large plain areas of skin tone, briefly modeled around eyes and mouth, under the nose and chin. The handling varies from drawn fill-in to an abruptly planar construction. His merits are his ability to oppose

At Esther-Robles, California artist Robert Frémont is having another exhibition of clever, colorful oils and drawings. There is a great deal of spoofing—plays on words in French and English, recurrent Pop banalities and a few semi-scatological references. Frémont doesn’t really belong to American Pop art genealogy, however, and his Surrealist-symbolist French origins show themselves in a number of ways. The ascendant stylistic influence comes from Chagall, in the way of stained-glass color applied in flats, compartmented composition and even a few idiomatic borrowings such as winged females and