Being led into some gray areas

The paintings in Tom LaDuke’s last exhibition at Angles Gallery, in 2004, were landscapes that treated the Southern California sky not as an icon of freedom or expansion but as a flat, gray, featureless space hanging like a sheet of steel over treetops and power lines.

The paintings in this show, his fourth with the gallery, depict a curious inversion: a flat, gray, featureless space -- namely, a television screen located in the artist’s studio -- that comes to assume a startling quality of expansion.

There are essentially three layers of visual information at play in each painting: a dimly discernible still from the film that is playing on the television when LaDuke snaps the photograph he will paint from (they’re all films he considers influential, including “The Exorcist,” “Blade Runner” and “Alien”); the reflections on the screen of objects in the artist’s studio (easels, chairs, paints and so on); and the atmospheric elements suspended between the screen and the camera (dust motes, beams of light, pinpoints of glare).

The effect is subtle but seamless. What appears at a distance to be a solid shade of gray dissolves, on closer inspection, into a tangle of ghostly shapes and smudges. Painted with acrylic on canvas (the landscapes were military enamel on aluminum), the works absorb your gaze while offering little of substance for it to hold on to.

The eye, in trying to make sense of what it’s looking at, shuffles between projection and reflection, flatness and depth, between a sense of being drawn in and one of being kept out. At moments, the surfaces seem dull and banal; at others, they shimmer and glow. These are intelligent paintings, full of complications and contradictions, and flawlessly executed.

Also included in the exhibition are several astonishingly crafted clay sculptures, each depicting a single object from an unspecified classical painting. (LaDuke opts for soft clay so as to approximate a fusion of painting and sculpture.)

They’re not obviously significant objects but details drawn from the periphery of a given work and apparently rendered from memory. Among them are a beautifully wrought tree stump, a dagger (with a small self-portrait cleverly reflected in the blade) and what may be the most remarkable sculpture of a dead bird you will ever see. It’s a small thing, perhaps a sparrow, that lies limp and unadorned on a plain white pedestal, and you will have to look awfully close to convince yourself it’s not real.

Virtuosic hyperrealism isn’t everything, but it certainly can be thrilling.

Disseminated as it is in LaDuke’s work across so many different media (the last show also included sculptures from plaster, Castilene and mechanical pencil lead) and -- more important -- paired with such a thoughtful and inquisitive conceptual sensibility, it distinguishes LaDuke as one of the more accomplished midcareer artists working in L.A.

Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through June 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

Artwork in an echo chamber

It can be difficult to get a handle on what David E. Stone is up to from news releases, announcements or other documentation because his projects -- conceptual in nature and thus difficult to capture in a jpeg -- tend to involve a rather baffling number of parts.

His first project in Los Angeles, launched immediately upon his arrival from Sacramento in 2004, consisted of 12 consecutive one-month exhibitions and a dizzying proliferation of multiples, including two series available by monthly subscription (in editions of 12 and 365, respectively); a series of 365 prints, each in an edition of two, auctioned one per day throughout the year on EBay; and a variety of wallet-sized trading cards, available both signed and unsigned, in limited and unlimited editions.

Got that?

His current exhibition at Gallery Revisited has had two parts. The first was up for three days before the opening and didn’t involve any artwork, just printed signs describing the works in his last exhibition at the gallery, in September.

The second, installed over the course of the opening, includes a dozen of his own works plus works by three other artists (despite its purporting to be a solo show): Richard Haley, Stephen Kaltenbach and Cathy Stone.

The conceptual basis for all this rigmarole is quite clever, fortunately, and does ultimately reward the attention it demands. The show’s title, “Rethinking (what has already been committed to memory),” is a play on the name of the gallery, as was the first half’s “revisiting” of previous works. The show’s invitation depicts a photograph of the word “rethinking” handwritten and erased multiple times. The three guest artists all revisit some previous work of Stone’s, and Cathy Stone’s drawing mimics the invite, using only the word “remember.”

The works themselves echo the works in the previous show on a formal level as well. A close-up photograph of contact lenses, for instance, hangs on a wall that previously held works involving record albums; a low black platform loaded with thumbtacks and paper clips appears in a spot that previously held a similar platform with a few hundred puzzle pieces.

The works also echo one another. The tacks and paper clips, for instance, are a three-dimensional approximation of the two-dimensional work that hangs just above: a photograph of television static.

Disentangling these threads can be entertaining, but what holds the show together is the quiet formal elegance of the pieces themselves: the contact lenses with their soft lavender glow, the glint of the paper clips below the snow of the static, and a photograph of matchbooks stacked on a reflective surface (the reflection being a “revisited” version of the image?), to name a few.

Gallery Revisited, 3204 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (626) 253-5266, through June 16. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

www.galleryrevisited.com

Beauty of photos is only skin deep

The photographs of Mona Kuhn look great at an art fair, in the pages of a magazine and on the invitation to her current show at M+B. They’re eye-catching, sexy, gauzily atmospheric. With their beach-house light and mild, summery tones, they suggest a place where one might very much like to spend a weekend.

Step inside the gallery, however, and a few significant shortcomings present themselves: namely, that they’re eye-catching, sexy and gauzily atmospheric -- rather than, say, challenging, innovative or even touching.

Though Kuhn purports in interviews to be interested in issues of relationship and community -- she takes the pictures in a naturist colony in France, where she spends the summer -- the work is notably lacking in warmth. And though she also claims to be interested in the body, hers can’t be a very wide-ranging interest, because there’s essentially only one body here: white, young, slender and lithe. (I’ve spotted a single black woman and a few older people in past work, but that’s the extent of it.)

The problem is not the implicit promotion of some kind of ideal -- an artist is certainly entitled to her ideal -- but that this body isn’t especially interesting, which is exactly why it’s become so valuable to the fashion industry: It flatters clothes. Without clothes, most of these subjects are about as compelling as naked mannequins, which wouldn’t be so bad if they were posed in such a way as to refute or complicate this association or, conversely, if there was any hint of irony.

As it is, the works look like pictures in a catalog more than anything else, mimicking the bland tropes of mainstream fashion without either confronting the ideologies inherent in them or adding anything new. Which is a shame, because a naturist colony in France is a really interesting subject. By editing out everything that might come across as messy -- any awkwardness, complication, personality or variety -- Kuhn does that subject a disservice.

M+B, 612 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 550-0050, through June 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.mbfala.com

Collages from found paper scraps

The 12 jewel-like collages in Margi Scharff’s lovely exhibition at Overtones are snapshots from seven years of travel throughout Asia, composed not photographically but from the many scraps of paper she collected along the way.

The geographical specificity of each piece can be seen in the list of materials Scharff includes with each title on the checklist, such as this one from a piece called “Oh Deer Oh Dear”: deer, tiger and lion off matchboxes found by the fruit and vegetable stand near the middle road to Dharamkot; cannon off a matchbox from the street by the Prince Polonia in Paharganj district of New Delhi; floral paper off kites found on the steps of the ghats in Varanasi; Hindi crossword from the Times of India.

The pleasure of the work lies in the tremendous care with which it was made.

Each piece involves hundreds of tiny cut or torn pieces, painstakingly arranged in countless layers.

The most elegant are mandala-like, with compact, centralized designs; others resemble diagrams or maps.

Two additional pieces take the form of long, many-jointed snakes. With a rich variety of color and texture -- Scharff has a marvelous eye -- they convey a lush and memorable sense of place. You can almost smell the street vendors.

Overtones, 11306 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 915-0346, through June 17. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.overtonesgallery.com