ART IN REVIEW.

Byline: MICHAEL ABATEMARCO

David Linn: New Works, Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Road, 986-9800; through Nov. 6

Taken individually, the paintings of David Linn have power. The images are striking and bold, with elements of baroque composition and painted in skillfully rendered detail. His work seems to owe something to Salvador Dali. In many of Linn's paintings, a nondescript figure, a kind of Everyman, moves through a barren landscape, sometimes communing with his environment, at others lost in it. But seeing the works together, they lose something. The use of specific elements, such as the omnipresent wide ribbons of cloth that serve both as clothing for the human figures and as subjects in themselves, becomes a bit too repetitive.

Each painting is rendered in a sepia tone, and that, like the spiritual themes Linn explores, adds a classic touch to his work. The figure in Expulsion is full of despair, striking a familiar pose that we have seen in countless renditions of the Fall of Man. There is a real sense of desolation that permeates the picture, heightened by the desert landscape .

The Christ-like figure in For a Thousand Years seems most Dali-like. The man, moving through the air on his own, contrasts with the male figure in Leap. In that painting, the man struggles to grasp a curl of fabric, a scarf that dangles just out of his reach. Where one figure flies, the other falls. For a Thousand Years and Leap would make a nice diptych.

A large piece, a 65-inch-tall painting called One, has an emptiness

at odds with its high-style presentation in a golden frame. It mirrors

The Covenant, which has a similar geometric configuration of fabric,

but one that is filled with human figures in a yin-yang configuration. The use of cloth in Linn's imagery often seems no more than an exercise in skilled representation.

The most successful works are those with no human figures and no fabric. They have upright stones that seem to vibrate with a life of their own. In Hierocentric, a group of stones placed in a circle like a Bronze Age henge appears to be in council. One stone floats above the others, defying logic. The painting called Yours shows a line of monoliths -- one is lit up by a mysterious light with no visible source. There is a coming together of human and stone imagery in a painting titled Here. The rock and the man stand together; they are companions in this weird world of David Linn.

-- Michael Abatemarco