Art review: Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia at CB1 Gallery

Clotheslines, floor mats and document shredders come to mind in Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia’s exhibition at CB1 Gallery. Hand-woven fabrics, pixelated imagery and religious tapestries are also evoked by his grid-bending abstractions, whose insouciance provides a nice balance between goal-oriented authority and seat-of-the-pants improvisation.

Each of Segovia’s eight pieces in the main gallery begins as a dozen or more sheets of thick paper. After painting both sides in an organic palette of mellow tertiaries, the Mexico-born, L.A.-based artist cuts each sheet into hundreds of long, skinny strips. Then he weaves them together, creating compositions whose humble beauty, both supple and sturdy, stands on its own.

A second gallery features eight little pieces, push-pinned to the walls like collected butterflies, and the largest work: a two-sided, 10-foot-square abstraction that does double duty as a room divider.

Many of Segovia’s works recall tartan plaids. But repetition yields to cockeyed improv, each element missing the mark and being all the more captivating for it.

In some, shadows shroud the picture plane in dusky mystery. In others, coherence disintegrates into flickering fields that resemble digital transmissions gone bad. Many read pictorially: the warp and woof of their surfaces opening onto spatial illusions. A few capture the sexy swing of hips sashaying beneath skirts and trousers.

In all of Segovia’s tastefully restrained paintings, hinting at things proves to be more potent than laying them bare.

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 -- David Pagel

CB1 Gallery, 207 W. 5th St., (213) 806-7889, through Feb. 19. Closed Mon.-Tue. www.cb1gallery.com

Image: Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, installation view of "Papel Tejido." Credit: CB1 Gallery.

Art review: Ryan Sluggett at Richard Telles Fine Art

Ryan Sluggett’s new paintings grab your eyes from the get-go. Their supersaturated colors, rambunctious compositions, crazy scale shifts, jagged shapes and wildly energized lines have all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop: fun while it lasts but a mess to clean up.

And then the eight big paintings in Sluggett’s first solo show in Los Angeles, at Richard Telles Fine Art, do something unexpected. The explosiveness with which they first impressed gives way to a type of refinement that is all the more powerful for being rough-edged. Bare-knuckle ruggedness and exquisite delicacy come together in Sluggett’s complex paintings, which marry the immediacy of instant messaging to the slow burn of great novels.

Sluggett works on unstretched expanses of finely woven fabric, using fabric dye, tempera, acrylic and oil paint to create lusciously dense surfaces. He slices irregularly shaped sections out of several sheets and sews them atop and alongside others, often leaving dangling edges. When he is finished stitching, he stretches his Frankenstein-style rectangles taut as drums and adds back-mounted frames. Their pastel loveliness complements the composition’s chaos.

Holding everything together is Sluggett’s laser-sharp visual intelligence. The Calgary-born, L.A.-based painter’s loaded fusions of pattern and patchwork do for painting what Jessica Stockholder’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink installations do for sculpture: throw it open to endless possibilities while letting you savor the details, right here and right now.

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-- David Pagel

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.tellesfineart.com

Image: Ryan Sluggett, "Stew," 2011. Credit: Heather Rasmussen.

Art review: Kristen Morgin's 'Snow White' at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

“Snow White in Evening Wear and Other Works” is Kristen Morgin’s fourth solo show in Los Angeles. It’s also her best. That’s saying a lot because her first three, in 2006, 2008 and 2009, are among the most memorable of the last decade.

This one is unforgettable: tragically sad and heart-wrenchingly bittersweet, it sings of loss with unsentimental intensity. Rather than coming off as despairing or even depressing, Morgin’s installation is quietly inspiring, not glibly uplifting but profoundly heartening in its clear-eyed insightfulness.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, nearly all of Morgin’s new sculptures are made of unfired clay, on whose fragile surfaces she draws and paints with great delicacy. Many pieces take the form of old-fashioned toys, most broken, and handcrafted puppets whose missing limbs have been replaced with ad hoc prosthetics. Others are low-relief collages, homemade renditions of such cartoon characters as Mickey, Popeye and Jiminy, whose heads, bodies and limbs are mismatched. Put together with devilish purpose, these piecemeal talismans often include worn playing cards and frayed game boards alongside comic books, paperbacks, bottle caps and jar lids. Even Morgin’s thumbtacks and pushpins are made of clay.

On the floor, Morgin has laid out two multipart pieces. Each is masterful.

Art review: 'Ingrid Calame' at Susanne Vielmetter

In the 1960s, Sol LeWitt did his part to invent conceptual art by giving assistants simple directions that instructed them to draw complex networks of lines on gallery walls. Ingrid Calame does something similar but different. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the results of her labors are out-of-this-world beautiful and anyone-could-do-it easy.

Rather than making up arbitrary instructions, Calame chooses two or three locations that strike her fancy. Her first L.A. solo show in 10 years, “From the LA River to Lackawanna,” features the concrete expanse of the Los Angeles River and, from Lackawanna, N.Y., an empty wading pool and the loading dock of the steel mill where her father once worked.

Calame sent groups of assistants, armed with pencils and huge rolls of paper, to all three locations. They traced every line, crack, stain, spill and chip of paint on the ground. The contours recall the lines police once drew around crime scene corpses, only far more elaborate.

Back in the studio, Calame selected sections from various locations and, assigning a color to each type of mark or its place in the composition, transferred it to a sheet of Mylar. Some of her drawings focus on a single location. Others overlay sections from paired locations. The show’s drop-dead centerpiece is a 50-foot mural Calame has drawn in raw pigment on the gallery wall.

The variety of shapes in all of her drawings is infinite. The uniqueness of snowflakes comes to mind, the miracle of endless difference all the more stunning for its origin in the grubby residue underfoot.

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-- David Pagel

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City. (310) 837-2117, through Feb. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com

Image: Ingrid Calame, "#346 Drawing (Tracing from the Perry Street Project Wading Pool, Buffalo, NY)," 2011. Credit: From Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Art review: Adam Ross at Angles Gallery

The icy precision of digital imagery meets the hot-blooded romanticism of hand-painted pictures in Adam Ross’ new works at Angles Gallery. Bolder and bigger, more focused and formidable than anything the L.A. artist has exhibited over the last 23 years, his gripping collisions of up-to-the-minute attitude and old-fashioned atmosphere form a gorgeous dystopia that is not all that different from reality — and all the more fascinating for it.

All titled “In an Indeterminate Place,” Ross’ hallucinatory stews of oil- and water-based pigments are nothing if not out there. Each seems to come from a far-off planet, accessible only by time travel or great leaps of the imagination.

The three biggest, at 7 by 6 feet, suck your body into a vortex where gravity quickly loses its power, leaving you suspended high above a landscape that looks lunar, only stranger: maybe Martian, possibly aquatic. Scale is hard to pin down. So is distance. It’s a little like looking into the Grand Canyon, whose mind-blowing, perception-messing vastness is both thrilling and humbling.

Ross’ paintings, often made of as many as 60 layers of variously translucent paints and glazes, simultaneously suggest microscopic views of cellular structures. In every one, the view Ross presents seems to have been enhanced by powerful lenses and intensified by the latest high-def technology. Giving the naked eye a power-boost, his works suggest that we are all cyborgs, at least in terms of how digital technology has transformed human consciousness.

Space-age surveillance and its military applications also come to mind, especially as they are celebrated in big-budget Hollywood productions in which nuance disappears in spectacular orgies of special effects.

That’s the opposite of what happens in front of Ross’ paintings. Their richly detailed surfaces compel viewers to attend to more than one storyline, which often unfold slowly, mysteriously and with no end in sight. While wondering about the size, substance and significance of what you are looking at, you also wonder about the relationship between photography and painting, abstraction and representation, fact and fiction, pleasure and dread, fear and excitement, life and death.

Mondrian’s palette of the primaries plus black and white lies behind Ross’ meticulous pictures. Malevich’s diagonals also haunt his evocative images, as do Jack Goldstein’s high-keyed canvases from the 1980s. Creating unexpected connections across time and space, Ross’ curiously contemplative paintings are slow burns that sizzle.

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-- David Pagel

Angles Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

Image: Adam Ross, "In an Indeterminate Place #3," 2012; Credit: From Angles Gallery

Art review: 'Brian Bress: Under Performing' at Cherry and Martin

The multipurpose nuttiness that ran riotously through Brian Bress’ exhibition three years ago is tamped down and polished up in “Under Performing.”  The L.A. artist’s two-part show at Cherry and Martin struggles and sputters, sometimes transforming nonsense into serenity while at other times getting stuck in smart-aleck sarcasm.

Projected on a wall in the first gallery is “Creative Ideas for Every Season,” a 20-minute road movie that relies too heavily on a script based on Agnes Martin’s rambling writings. The dialogue is a mix of clichés and wisdom, earnestness and stupidity. Too often it comes off as a repackaged rehash of image-and-text conceptualism, its words called on to do more than they can manage and its visuals short-shrifted.

Bress is at his best with DIY sets, costumes and props, as well as with raucously collaged backdrops, preposterous dream sequences and whiplash edits. All are overshadowed by the streamlined stylization of his frugal movie, which smooths over the rough edges necessary for him to strut his stuff.

The eight works in the second gallery are also digital videos. Each flat-screen monitor hangs on the wall like a painting and sports a custom frame. Narrative slows down to a crawl. Scenes do not change. Nor do camera angles. And the characters pretty much just stand there, as if they inhabit tableaux vivants gone wrong. Weirdness gives way to something like tranquillity, which doesn’t come easy and keeps you attentive to every little detail.

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-- David Pagel

Cherry and Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-0100, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cherryandmartin.com

Image: Brian Bress, still from "Creative Ideas for Every Season," 2010. Credit: From Cherry and Martin

Art review: 'Roger Kuntz: Signs of LA' at Louis Stern Fine Arts

Roger Kuntz (1926-75) made some great paintings that should be better known. Some of the best, from his “Freeway,” “Sign” and “Blimp Series,” make up a powerful exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts.

“Signs of LA” goes a long way to remind viewers that artistic accomplishment and fame do not always go together. It’s a treat to visit a show in which the former exceeds the latter so disproportionately that you feel as if you are watching history happen. To see Kuntz’s point blank pictures of the means and mechanics of transport is to sense that you are getting a preview of the future, a time when these terrific distillations of modern life’s mysteries hold their own among such standouts as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins and John McLaughlin.

Kuntz’s paintings are whip-smart and accessible. They break up space like nobody’s business, creating complex compositions in the tight confines of the picture plane. They play light against shadow with no-nonsense aplomb, giving form to time’s passage by compressing everything important into an instant. And with great economy of means, they conjure vast landscapes beyond their edges: both the endless sprawl of L.A.’s freeways and the unfathomable vastness of our interior worlds, which are filled with their own twists and turns, dead ends and exits, intersections and underpasses.

That’s a lot to take in. But great art usually works on many levels. And never the same way twice.

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-- David Pagel

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through Feb. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.louissternfinearts.com

Image: Roger Kuntz, "Asphalt Triple Arrows," circa 1962. Credit: From Louis Stern Fine Arts.

Art review: Tom Knechtel at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

The nooks and crannies of a healthy consciousness take center stage in the 11 drawings and three paintings Tom Knechtel has made over the last four years. At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, the L.A. artist’s fanciful pictures of swarthy wrestlers, muscular dancers and beasts of the field inspire the human imagination to do what it does best: entertain fantasies unencumbered by the constraints of civil society.

That’s not to say that Knechtel’s brilliantly articulated images of libraries, theaters, carousels, stables, cisterns and circus tents are barbaric or in any way untoward. In fact, they’re among the most civilized works out there. Wickedly sophisticated, graciously welcoming and up to the challenge of anything anyone might bring to them, these urbane celebrations of exquisitely literary pleasures are both tough and toTuching, endearingly sweet and rigorously unsentimental about it.

In Romanticism’s heyday, back in the 18^th century, poets and painters sought to expand human consciousness and identity by making members of their audiences sympathize, deeply, with beasts and people whose sentiments and experiences were generally looked down upon.  

Knechtel’s deliciously detailed and powerfully expansive pictures build on Romanticism’s dreamy achievements. Treating beasts and people as equally sentient creatures, they show us all to be capable of great sensitivity and vulnerable to heartbreaking suffering — part of an ongoing drama that is comic and tragic and intensely moving.

-- David Pagel

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, (323) 933-9911, through Jan. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com

 Image: Tom Knechtel, "The Cistern," 2008. Credit: From Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Art review: Kirsten Hassenfeld at Peter Mendenhall Gallery

In her L.A. solo debut at Peter Mendenhall Gallery, New York artist Kirsten Hassenfeld transforms used gift-wrapping paper into strangely beautiful things whose heft and punch belie their modest beginnings.

Hanging from the ceiling, two take the shape of gigantic ornaments: 4- and 5-foot orbs covered with towers that recall the architecture of medieval castles, the designs of fantastic spaceships and children’s drawings of souped-up stars.

Another piece is made of 22 page-size hexagons, each oddly patterned mandala abutted to at least one other. Arrayed low on the wall so that its silhouette resembles a ruin, “Rockwork” also evokes hand-woven hot pads and decorative dishrags.

Hassenfeld’s three best pieces are the smallest: bits and pieces of wrapping paper that she has rolled into long, skinny spools — like drinking straws — and glued, after flattening them, to boards. Some strands have been woven, forming harlequin patterns. Others have been laid side-by-side, creating geometric configurations that recall eccentric quilts and the clunky graphics of video games from the 1980s. Each of Hassenfeld’s funky collages is an abstract landscape whose sky is alive with crackling, handcrafted magic and spooky, down-home charm.

--David Pagel

Peter Mendenhall Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 936-0061, through Jan. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.petermendenhallgallery.com

Image: Kirsten Hassenfeld, "Storm Signal," 2011. Credit: From Peter Mendenhall Gallery

Art review: Adrian Saxe at Frank Lloyd Gallery

The goofy exuberance and try-anything giddiness for which Adrian Saxe is best known are nowhere to be found in his exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, which pairs four pieces Saxe made in 1968 with 10 works from 2011. The L.A. artist’s first solo show in seven years replaces the out-of-whack gracefulness, acrobatic optimism and I-can-do-anything glee of his works from the last few decades with a sense of mortality richly seasoned by a deep appreciation of the absurd twists and turns that define modern life.

Over-the-top virtuosity is still essential to Saxe’s gorgeously glazed and fantastically formed vessels, which have so little in common with utilitarian pots and vases that they might as well be from another planet — one inhabited by a civilization more noble and less narcissistic than ours.

Like his four sturdy works from 1968, Saxe’s new sculptures are blunt — not really rugged but far less frilly than the post-modern Baroque extravaganzas that had become his trademark. Often stubborn, sometimes ugly and always grounded in the vulnerability of the flesh, they insist that the time for fussing over details is long gone and that it may be too late to do much that matters.

The fatalism embraced by Saxe’s mutant mélanges is liberating. It strips illusions from life and gets down to the naked basics of existence. Humor comes through loud and clear as a love of funny business makes despair look shortsighted.

Like trophies for achievements rarely celebrated by a culture obsessed with instantaneous communication (if not gratification), Saxe’s lumpy sculptures in “GRIN: Genetic Robotic Information Nano (Technologies)” are a slow burn, their pleasures profound and well worth the wait.

-- David Pagel

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, (310) 264-3866, through Jan. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.franklloyd.com

Image: Adrian Saxe, "Welcome Stranger," 2011. Credit: From Frank Lloyd Gallery