Good Thistles -- Jonathan Evans at Quackenbush’s (2120 Guadalupe, 472-4477) through January -- Someone told me there was a good painting at Quackenbush’s. Of course, I was skeptical. I mean, come on -- a good painting? At a cafe? But it turned out she was right. In a pretty good show of work by Jonathan Evans, an uneventful group of small, sparse photographs was punctuated by three large, sparse paintings. One was an over-the-top (under-the-bottom?) existential melodrama involving a dead fly in a windowsill. Another was a muddled attempt at a spooky, barren landscape. But, lo and behold, the third was a gripping, sophisticated portrait of a sad, almost tragic group of thistles.

The entire show had an impressively consistent aesthetic premise -- austere, monolithic, representational minimalism suggesting, but not depicting, human issues of isolation or estrangement -- even though the dozen or so photographs diverged into two slightly incongruous branches, one dealing with murkiness and the other with clarity. But it was the thistles that successfully fulfilled that premise. The elegant composition (an arrangement of vaguely anthropomorphic thistle flowers seemingly sprouting from a common source, variously bound or separated by an almost familial or social tension), the understated (yet proficient) handling, and the choice of subject meshed perfectly, with the support of the relative thematic cohesion of the photos, to convey the poignant barrenness and the dramatic pathos attempted in the other two paintings, but with a subtlety and internalized complexity that they lacked.

Owen Towles at Mojo’s (2714 Guadalupe, 477-6656) through January -- Sometimes an artist is his own worst enemy, especially when his stubborn attachment to his idea of what the work should be about spoils a group of paintings that would be better served if they were allowed to speak for themselves. Owen Towles’ current show at Mojo’s suffers in this way.

The basic theme in the exhibition is a high-stakes simplicity pitting circular forms against the irregularities of a variety of shapes and materials. The circle assumes a primeval identity, cast as an egg, or the sun, or the earth, or merely a unity or singularity. The problems begin with a recurring allusion to things oriental. Some of the circles are embossed with abstract figural elements suggestive of Eastern calligraphic characters that introduce a specificity that destroys some of the powerful and mysterious implications of the circle.

The most beautiful image in the show, a dull red textured sun/circle blazing against a blackboard-like field with partially erased, seemingly non-verbal, scrawlings, contained by a weathered window-like frame, finds its perfect economy of form, color, texture, and material similarly undermined by its almost insulting title, "East." Oh. I get it. Big red rising sun. Japan. East.

"Tributaries," another beautiful piece, also sees its implicit strengths pre-empted by the artist’s reluctance to leave well enough alone. With readings that comfortably shift from circulatory imagery on one level to maps of continents and rivers on another, this delicate and complex integration of layers of images and meaning is upended by the attention-starved central image, a garish circle made of dented copper that, as Dizzy Gillespie would have said, "beeped when it should have bopped."