SANTA MONICA

Like bales of embroidered silks or inlaid table tops from some exotic port, Terence La Noue’s painting-collages offer textured layers of mysterious, color and pattern. Memories of several modernist styles wind in and out--Klee’s delicate geometries here, traces of Hofmann’s colored rectangles there. But La Noue achieves a brew of his own, webbed effects, sunken areas of color and a small repertoire of superimposed motifs: ladder, skull, canoe. This is densely detailed stuff that invades the senses like perfume and invites luxurious scrutiny.

Charles Ginnever’s big bronze and steel sculptures, made to be rooted outdoors, look somewhat ill at ease in a gallery. “Gemini,” from the “Flat Illusion” series, is a linked set of massive open boxes rendered in exaggerated perspective. They sit on a lumbering base with elephantine bolts that (one hopes) would be hidden by earth and grass in situ. “Azuma” looks like a large origami construction in bronze, folded into alternating green-patinaed triangles. The most appealing piece--a table top version of a theme Ginnever has trotted out elsewhere in full-sized works--is “Bronze Texas Triangles,” a blithe foursome balanced on points that lurch either forward or backward, giving the group the air of good pals who have had one round too many. (Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, to Nov. 7.)