Santa Monica

Described as “imaginary landscapes,” Janis Provisor’s large paintings and works on paper look like weird, gnarled woods or tide pools that might serve as home to those lovable incandescent aliens that peeled off their humanoid exteriors in Ron Howard’s film “Cocoon.” Happily luminous, eerie but never threatening, the works’ shallow space is packed with dense invented filaments of vegetation and sea life.

The pieces are usually dominated by thorny branching shoots that look as if they’re part wood, part unidentified organic matter, part calcareous growth. These are laden with generative lichens, gossamer pods throbbing with life or bright persimmon floral clusters that we’re not likely to see anywhere on this planet. In “Parachute,” some seaweedy thing grows up, into and through a canopy of gooey white matter.

Provisor bathes compositions in ribbons of washy bright color that look like illogical rivers running against gravity, flooding and feeding these strange environs. With silver, copper and cold metallic pigments woven into backgrounds, these formally complex works exude an exotic elegance. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to May 7.)