Gregory Crewdson poses at the Gagosian Gallery

All the world may be a stage, but Gregory Crewdson's big color photographs manage to flatten it into a backdrop for an overproduced photo shoot. Like ads for luxury cars, pricey perfumes and exotic getaways, Crewdson's 19 nearly 5-by-8-foot inkjet prints at the Gagosian Gallery are less concerned with exploring the world they depict than with selling a fantasy about it.

Nothing wrong with that. A compelling illusion can be eye-opening.

Unfortunately, Crewdson's meticulously manicured images (in editions of six) peddle the fiction that reality is only meaningful when it mimics the movies -- that everyday life matters only when it arranges itself in scenes, settings and stills with which we're familiar. That takes the unpredictability out of life, not to mention its messy complexities and incompleteness. It also treats viewers as detached, passive onlookers -- dupes whose only pleasures are voyeuristic and creepy and all the worse for being parsimoniously catered to by the artist, who acts like an omnipotent director (or at least a Hollywood version of one).

Nearly all of Crewdson's elaborately scripted pictures were shot at twilight, with particular attention paid to the encroaching darkness. The exterior shots feature a generic small town, with some focusing on its business district, more on its residential streets and most on the edges of town, where clapboard homes and trailer parks give way to power plants, storage yards and railway bridges. Shadowy woods surround everything, and rivers figure prominently. Off camera, fog machines and spotlights add uppercase, italicized ATMOSPHERE!, insisting that viewers don't miss the overinflated POETRY!

Half-naked women and one buck-naked couple interrupt the otherwise ordinary scenery. In one print, a nude woman, who appears to be about eight months pregnant, stands like a statue in a garden. Her pink skin glows as if lighted from within, yet no one notices, except you, the lucky viewer, to whom Crewdson force-feeds his vision.

The interior shots are even creepier. Several compel viewers to be window-peekers, to look in on others, all women: a young one with a newborn, a middle-aged one staring into space and an old one with a letter, her weariness overdramatized.

The only time Crewdson invites viewers inside is in "Untitled (The Father)." In the background, a young woman turns her back. In the foreground, an old guy slouches in an old chair, his bathrobe falling open to reveal skin that looks plastic.

If Duane Hanson made a hyper-realistic sculpture of Christopher Walken and Cindy Sherman photographed it, the image's emotional tenor would be similar to a Crewdson's: too obsessed with its own manufacture -- its own excessively fetishized Realism -- to get viewers involved or to resonate very long.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through June 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

Abstract art gets twisted, tangled

At a time when art is increasingly called on to be all things to all people -- entertaining, educational and, above all, a good investment-- James Richards appears to be a throwback to an age when all that mattered was art, when aesthetic questions provided artists with sufficient grist for their peculiar mills.

Yet there's nothing simple about Richards' nine new paintings at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, even if each seems backward, out of step, low-tech, lumpy, almost ugly. The L.A. artist's mid-size works turn abstract painting inside out as they give powerful form to the haywire sublime.

A typical piece by Richards looks as if it has been cobbled together from scraps swept from the floor of a kid's sugar-fueled summer-camp craft session: tangled strings, twisted pipe cleaners, lengths of yarn and crusty puddles of paint, sometimes applied in straight-from-the-jar strokes and at other times freely mixed, a happy melting pot of liquid rainbows and wet-on-wet eagerness.

The foundation of each untitled painting is a plain rectangular frame, painted some shade of matte gray or dull beige. To its face, Richards has stapled a messy network of string. The madcap patterns, or anarchistic compositions, suggest the paths of drunken hummingbirds or molecules in a microwave left on all night.

Into the spaces among some strings Richards has woven yarn and wrapped brightly colored pipe cleaners -- like a needlepoint addict determined to do his thing, by any means necessary. Into other spaces he has slathered gooey gobs of acrylic, filling the oddly angled shapes with even odder 3-D forms. Sometimes he paints atop these dried scabs of color, adding more figure-ground ambiguity.

Richards' basic materials give his works surprising range. No two paintings look alike. With shifting rhythms, distinct atmospheres and quirky dynamics, each evokes a rich blend of experiences.

Metaphors mix promiscuously. Different parts of different paintings resemble broken guitar strings, barbed-wire fences, moss-covered phone lines, barnacle-encrusted cables, intergalactic tumbleweeds and the tactile equivalent of computer viruses.

Chaos is ever-present. So is the suggestion that something has gone wrong -- dreadfully, absurdly, comically.

At their heart, Richards' paintings are optimistic. Holding themselves together with little more than spit and willfulness, they combine good old American ingenuity with Darwinian ferocity to convey the thrills and terrors of our times.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through June 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.shoshanawayne.com