LA CIENEGA AREA

East Coast artist Jesse Dominguez paints hot, peach-toned, ambiguous interiors where pensive or melancholy women sit surrounded by still-life objects such as fruit and jars. He also paints solitary collections of jars and bottles that look suspiciously like exercises from art class. Dominguez deliberately manipulates light, perspective and architecture so that we’d call these settings more fantastic than real, but there is something missing here. Effective work that juggles fact and imagination--by Balthus, Giorgio Morandi and currently Eric Fischl--straddles both worlds but never sets a firm foot in either. Dominguez’s doughy, pudgy figuration strikes us as more formally and psychologically equivocal than enigmatic. A melange of crude, folkish representation and forced classical musings is uneasy at best and completely unconvincing at worst. Only in “Studio Interior” and the Fauve-ish, visionary “Landscape” do objects churn with that odd, reinvented reality of dreams. (Jessica Darraby Gallery, 8214 Melrose Ave., to Nov. 13.)