Around the galleries by Christopher Knight

Peter Rösel, a Berlin-based artist who grew up partly in Morocco and Iraq, has been painting a series of works since 2001 that he calls the Fata Morgana Project. Named after Morgan le Fay, the mythical fairy sister of King Arthur, a fata morgana is a mirage -- the optical displacement of distant objects or the sky caused by bending rays of light.

What could be a gimmick is instead a poignant, poetic organizing device in Rösel's compelling debut exhibition at Chung King Project. A marvelous triptych is especially fine. Titled on the stretcher bars with the geographic coordinates where Rösel set up his easel in Africa's Namibian desert, as intense heat jumbled by cool air blowing in off the South Atlantic created regular mirages, the disconcerting works are composed from a wide expanse of pale blues, tans and white.

Each of the three canvases is about 39 inches high and 71 inches wide, which yields a cumulative horizontal landscape nearly 18 feet across. A black man carrying a pickax and dressed in a sweat suit stands at the left side of each otherwise empty panel. With the tool balanced on his shoulder in the first two, he removes his jacket in apparent deference to the heat.

In the third, no longer shown in profile, he turns his back on the viewer and appears to be pointing the pickax toward the horizon. Just where that horizon lies is not easy to discern, since it's shattered into a shimmering mirage. Distant hills appear to float above the desert floor, as blue sky seeps beneath them to puddle on the earth. As an image of distress -- of a routine urge to locate and anchor oneself in a world determined to slip from empty and chimerical to hostile and tangible -- the juxtaposition of hilly mirage and useless digging tool is seductive and memorable.

Nearby, a quirky figurative sculpture made from barbed wire, a circular saw blade, a plaster-filled balloon, some chunks of concrete and dribbles of resin leans precariously off its pedestal, poised to topple to the ground. But it's the man in the desert -- either liberated or imperiled -- who seems truly without an anchor. Rösel is his artistic surrogate.

Chung King Project, 936 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1802, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com