Person, place and thing: "The Undiscovered Country," an idiosyncratic show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, examines the last 40 years of representational painting, with an emphasis on the present

Another exemplar of this genre, for Ferguson, is Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, who has five paintings in the show. Unlike Marshall's lament for American victims of political violence, which supplies the viewer with clues to its theme, Tuyraans's vignettes of unidentifiable figures and sites withhold their meaning almost totally. Often, it's only the sheer banality of the painting that compels us to wonder about the backstory of the image, which is available through the ancillary realm of press releases, artist interviews and exhibition reviews. Once you find out that the hands in a picture belong to Colin Powell and Hosni Mubarak, or that another image depicts an episode from African colonial history, you might return to the painting with more thoughts in your mind, but it has to be asked whether the soft-focus, near-grisaille paintings themselves are visually compelling without this additional knowledge. Despite his evident desire to draw our attention to particular historical events, Tuymans also seems to be likening them to a box of fading snapshots filled with forgotten faces and places.

The third of the show's interesting new artists is Kirsten Everberg, a 39-year-old L.A.-born artist who now lives in London. Her two contributions, Lobby and Bar (both 2003), are big paintings of hotel interiors that seem at once glitzy and drab. The catalogue reveals that the images are of Communist-era hotels in the Czech Republic. These unpopulated, highly detailed scenes are pervaded with lights, mirrors and glass that Everberg renders as blobular, watery shapes; everything seems suspended between liquid and solid. This effect is largely the result of Everberg's artful use of oil and enamel paint in tandem, a combination that has long been employed by New York painter Lydia Dona. (This coincidence made me wonder about the definition of "representational"--Dona's paintings, for instance, are usually classified as "abstract," but they are loaded with machine imagery that is clearly representational; something similar happens in the work of Fabian Marcaccio, and Gerhard Richter's recent book War Cut prompts one to become more aware of the "representational" aspects of his abstract paintings. It might have been interesting if Ferguson had been less conventional in setting the limits of "representation.")

Hotel imagery also turns up in the paintings of Enoc Perez and Silke Otto-Knapp, though in the latter case one only knows this by reading the catalogue. The New York-based Perez takes images from postcards of hotels in his native Puerto Rico and renders them large using a transfer method to achieve the grainy effect of bad photo-reproductions. His work is a testament to the widespread obsession with modernist architecture among today's painters. Otto-Knapp paints washed-out foliage, apparently inspired by the trees around resort hotels. Also present but not particularly impressive are canvases by Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie and German-born, L.A.-based Thomas Eggerer, nor are the two paintings by well-known British painter Peter Doig among his best. Some of the older works--four paintings by John Baldessari from the late 1960s, two by Neil Jenney from the same period--also fail to stand out, perhaps because they aren't successfully recontextualized as are the works in the Hamilton-Klein pairing, or perhaps simply because, unlike the Fairfield Porter paintings, they haven't been able to transcend their original historical moment. There is also a '70s Guston. While I'm always happy to see one of this artist's's late works, here it looks a little lost, since none of the younger painters in the show seem engaged with the concerns that animated Guston. This is the biggest of Ferguson's curatorial missteps, since so many painters continue to draw fruitfully from Guston's legacy. Perhaps the emphasis on the painting-photography dialogue precluded them, but ill that case, why put in a Guston at all?