Kirsten Everberg at 1301PE

In 2004, L.A. artist Kirsten Everberg contributed two memorably pretty paintings to "The Undiscovered Country" at the UCLA Hammer Museum. And the glossy oil-and-enamel canvases in her second solo show at 1301 PE are so good looking that you can already hear some critics wondering out loud if they're too pretty.

This exhibition, consisting of just a handful of 6-by-9 and 4-by-5-foot paintings, features interior scenes and architectural details from a mix of ancien regime and modern buildings in Nancy, France, where the artist recently participated in a group show organized by the city. While the buildings vary in style, Everberg's approach is consistent. Her palette includes white, black, olive, mauve, gold and an array of metallic blues and grays. Her favorite effect seems to be taking a drab color, like a jaundiced yellow, and making it shine. Another is layering black enamel on black oil to create puddles of shimmering darkness.

Such special effects prove most powerful when the subject itself somehow warrants a high-gloss treatment, as in Lounge, Haut du Lievre (Nancy), 2005, featuring a stark modernist lobby filled with a cluster of black Bauhaus-style steel chairs. Here, dabs of black enamel give the chair's metal legs and the staircase's metal railing their edge, setting them off from the black floor. What's more, the painting's glossiness seems to make a larger cultural point, highlighting the way in which modernism in particular and good design in general have become the very image of the good life.

Everberg doesn't seem especially critical of luxury commodities or high-end design; she celebrates a sleek chair much as a Pop artist might pay homage to a catchy billboard. This is also true when she whips up paintings of baroque fountains using highly gestural brushwork. While the fountains' ornamental sculpture could not be more fussy, the brushwork is refreshingly casual, with drops of white enamel evoking the cascading of water. Near the bottom of each fountain, the white pools together with gold, forming within the larger work a tiny drip painting--a nod, perhaps, to Jackson Pollock's use of enamel.

All of these paintings are visual knockouts, but they also look remarkably similar to each other, with their deeply appealing patterning, nearly ugly coloring and gorgeous sheen. Everberg should take note: while there's nothing necessarily wrong with celebrating surface, there is something suspect about relying too heavily on a single formula. She would be smart to show in her next body of work that she can make a painting shine without a can marked "high-gloss finish."

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