Covering a wall as act of joy

If last weekend’s pageant of 80-plus openings -- the kickoff to the fall season -- had been a contest, the prize for most thrill per square foot would almost surely have gone to Andrew Schoultz’s “Power Structures and Chaos” at Roberts & Tilton, a giddy maelstrom of an exhibition packed in the closet-sized vault of the gallery’s project space.

Horses charge, flags wave, clouds of arrows darken the sky -- it’s hard to say just who’s fighting whom, but the momentum is exhilarating. The show’s five paintings -- on canvas and panel, ranging from 18 inches to 6 feet tall -- suggest medieval battle scenes awash in swirling currents of pictorial shrapnel: arrows, leaves, ribbons, raindrops and waves, all rendered with pinpoint precision.

Interspersed with the paintings are murals. Waves churn along the floor on one wall, a red brick pyramid in the corner erupts like a volcano and, high above, a band of arrows whirls round the perimeter of the space.

The floor is painted to look like red brick and scattered with several pyramid-shaped sculptures, also faux brick, with additional battle scenes on certain panels. The largest pyramid, in the center of the room, supports a scale that balances the weight of two small calla lilies -- the show’s only point of peace and stillness.

Schoultz hails from a loose school of San Francisco artists -- Barry McGee, the late Margaret Kilgallen, Clare Rojas and Aaron Noble (now an Angeleno) are others -- whose work integrates fine art, mural, graffiti and street art traditions with unselfconscious ease.

One result of this fusion has been a refreshingly dynamic approach to exhibition design. This is installation driven less by rarefied concepts of space, light or the presumed experience of the viewer than by the sheer joy of covering a wall.

Schoultz’s imagery, however, is distinctive and increasingly so: more mystical than folkish, characterized by frenetic, often fractured compositions and overlapping currents of intricate linear patterns. He’s been impressively prolific in recent years, with solo (or two-person) shows at several L.A. venues -- Taylor de Cordoba, the BLK/MRKT Gallery, Giant Robot and Track 16 -- as well as quite a few on the East Coast, and the imagery appears to be constantly shifting, developing and adapting. Certain motifs pop up again and again -- the horses, pyramids, volcanoes, ships -- but an underlying restlessness keeps it all in constant motion, which makes Schoultz one to watch: He’s clearly hitting his stride.

On view in the gallery’s main space is another extremely enjoyable show. “Slagroom” features drawings and sculptures by the Belgian artist Peter Rogiers. The title is Dutch for “whipped cream,” which is what the sculptures appear to be made of.

The list of their actual materials -- epoxy, polyester, iron, polyurethane foam and polyurethane varnish -- is decidedly less appetizing but underscores the feat of their confectionery weightlessness. The three largest pieces -- all free-standing works, 3 to 6 feet tall and turquoise -- are so buoyant as to be nearly airborne.

Though not exactly representational, they resemble human figures tumbling through space, each balanced on its own slender stand with the reckless air of a slapstick comedian. The impression of spontaneity and flailing movement is a delicious illusion, belying careful engineering and a pitch-perfect sense of equilibrium.

The four smaller sculptures, mostly white and presented on tall plywood pedestals, are more about shape than movement, but they are equally compelling, with bulbous, writhing, goopy forms and an absorbing range of textures. The traditional scale of the works gives the show a pleasantly classical feel, despite the synthetic materials: Rodin meets Charlie Chaplin, say, with a bit of the Blob thrown in.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 549-0223, through Oct. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.robertsandtilton.com--

When nature and urban life conflict

A native Southern Californian -- born in Oceanside, schooled at Otis (bachelor of arts) and UC Irvine (master of fine arts) and now living in Los Angeles -- Ruben Ochoa clearly has a feel for concrete. His last two major projects employed trompe l’oeil techniques to undercut perceptions of the material’s mass and ubiquity.

In “Extracted,” an installation at LAXART about this time last year, he filled the gallery with what looked like a 15-by-18-foot slab of concrete and a truckload of dirt -- but that turned out to be only a very convincing imitation, constructed of 2-by-4s and chicken wire and hollow. In a related public work, he draped a freeway retaining wall with a photographic image of the hillside behind it, giving the impression that portions of the wall had been stripped away.

His current show at Susanne Vielmetter is more modest in scale but no less eloquent. Here, he focuses primarily on the intricate entanglement of the urban and natural environments as reflected in the figure of the ficus tree -- a non-native plant whose roots, once established, are strong enough to disrupt the concrete blocks of sidewalks and curbs.

Several large-scale photographs, each installed fittingly close to the ground, depict specific examples of this phenomenon. They’re simple but surprisingly powerful images, conveying the interaction as a complex negotiation of space -- aggressive but also tender, even sensual, with both tree and concrete twisting, bending and shifting to accommodate one another.

A cluster of sculptures extends the ficus/concrete communion a step further, presenting tree stumps and shipping pallets, some incorporating concrete, that appear to be morphing from one material to the other.

For the final component of the show -- a piece titled “The hardest part was removing the walls / If I had a rebar for every time someone tried to mold me. . . “ -- Ochoa has fitted the gallery’s project space with a dense thicket of rebar, as if preparing to fill the room with concrete. Simultaneously delicate, even fragile, and dauntingly impenetrable, the installation is an impressive sight, emblematic of Ochoa’s knack for extracting elegance from banality.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Oct. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com--

Tom Cruise, the up-and-comer

Thirty-one portraits of Tom Cruise may seem excessive, and -- well, yes, it probably is, especially when one of those portraits is 9 feet tall and he’s wearing a denim jacket with the collar turned up and his hands are hovering kind of strangely around his uncomfortably conspicuous crotch.

Give it time, though, and “1983,” Mark Stockton’s second exhibition at the Acuna-Hansen Gallery, may grow on you. Not all the works are so massive, for one thing. Most are about the size of a postcard.

Also, this is a sweet, simple Cruise -- not the leering celeb-gone-weird of recent headlines but the sparkling-eyed heartthrob whose first five major roles (in “Taps,” “The Outsiders,” “Losin’ It,” “Risky Business” and “All the Right Moves”) pretty much covered the bases of idealized American maleness, embodying the soldier, the rebel, the party boy and the jock.

Stockton memorializes this Cruise in meticulous reproductions -- four in charcoal, the rest in oil -- of stills and publicity shots taken from these five films, all circa 1983 (hence the title).

There’s something endearingly odd about this show, and it may be not what Stockton aims to get right -- about identity, celebrity, masculinity, what have you -- so much as what he misses: namely, that sparkling thing, whatever it is, that makes Cruise Cruise. The pictures, though skillfully rendered and easy enough to identify, are all just a bit off. Each captures some aspects of Cruise’s face, but none manage to pull enough of these together to create a truly resonant likeness. The result is that each seems to represent a slightly different person.

It’s the awkwardness, ultimately, that’s most intriguing. Channeling a synthetic product like celebrity through the fallible mechanism of the human hand is bound to result in some curious hybrids, and that’s what you’ll find here, presented with rather touching sincerity.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Los Angeles, (323) 441-1624, through Oct. 20. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.ahgallery.com--

Big, bold paintings in small spaces

Sherié Franssen’s “Claustrophobia,” at the Jancar Gallery, packs 16 mostly large-scale paintings -- some as big as 7 by 7 feet -- into one of L.A.’s coziest gallery spaces, which probably explains the show’s title. Once you’re there, there’s no shying away.

You’re plunged into the lush, fervent, frenetic world of Franssen’s painterly imagination, submerged in blizzards of brush strokes that only occasionally cohere into any sort of structure. If you can get over the frustration of not being able to stand more than a few feet from any particular piece, however, the intimacy becomes interesting.

They’re romantic paintings, seeped in the poetics of gesture and the redemptive sensuality of oils. It’s easy to get lost in their fevered undulations.

Jancar Gallery, 3875 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1308, Los Angeles, (213) 384-8077, through Oct. 6. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.jancargallery.com