Wolfgang Tillmans at Regen Projects

Wolfgang Tillmans is not an artist who operates from project to project, in distinct, consecutive series, but who proceeds, rather, along multiple interweaving paths at once -- some personal in nature, some sociological, some political, some highly formal. Though grounded in photography, his work assumes myriad forms and explores a near schizophrenic array of genres: snapshot, documentary, portrait, landscape, still life, even abstraction.

Given the casual air his work often assumes, such breadth might easily be mistaken for a dilettantish lack of focus. He seizes on the unexceptional: the side of an apartment building, an airline billboard, a pair of dogs asleep on the ground. Though more capable than most of making a beautiful picture, he increasingly downplays the photogenic.

All of which makes him rather awkwardly suited to the conditions of a commercial gallery exhibition, which tend to privilege discrete projects and themes compact enough to be comfortably contained in the few paragraphs of a news release.

"half page," his fifth solo show at Regen Projects, is a substantial but nonetheless partial and rather scattered selection of recent work, and as such, may not win him any converts. Indeed, for those not already sympathetic to his project, it would be easy to interpret the show in line with many of his perennial critics: as so many random bits and pieces.

This reading, however, misses the point. Central to Tillmans' career has been an extended flirtation with banality, pursued not merely for its own sake, in a spirit of slacker irony, but with the deep, philosophical conviction that no aspect of the social, physical or political world is devoid of meaning or unworthy of investigation. If individual images occasionally fall flat out of context -- and I confess there are several in this show whose inclusion I find perplexing -- it needn't detract from virtue of the pursuit and the value of such a holistic perspective.

More important, however, the "bits and pieces" reading belies Tillmans' exceptional rigor as an artist. However banal many of his subjects, for instance, his methods of selection and organization are highly conscientious and complex.

This show, like much of his recent work, has a strong, if oblique, political undercurrent relating to issues of violence, war, globalism and consumerism, articulated most distinctly in the several collages composed across the surface of specially constructed tabletops. They function as visual essays, combining his own photographs with news clippings, advertisements, signs, stamps and other bits of ephemera. (One contains a sheet of paper that reads simply: "What's wrong with redistribution?")

Even more striking in recent years -- and in this show in particular -- is the complexity of his formal language. From his many experiments with scale and installation strategies to his investigation of related technologies like photocopying and video to his recent forays into darkroom-borne abstraction, few photographers in recent memory, or even in history, have undertaken such a far-ranging exploration of the photograph as an object.

There are three videos in this show, all depicting characteristically quotidian subjects: peas boiling in a pot of water; a rotating Mercedes emblem at the top of a high rise in West Berlin; and a man's armpit. Though lacking the distinctive sharpness and sensuality of his photographs, the works point in an intriguing direction with an air of tentative curiosity.

It is the abstraction that dominates, however: glossy sheets of vivid color -- blue, black, orange, green -- printed small and large, some crumpled or folded and encased like sculpture in clean Plexiglas boxes. They're dazzlingly seductive objects that seem to boil the entire discipline of photography down to its most poetic essence.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Dec. 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.



Haunting images of expansion



The photographs in Mark Ruwedel's series "Westward the Course of Empire," at Gallery Luisotti, resemble the expeditionary images of such 19th century American photographers as Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins so closely that they might, at a glance, be mistaken for the real thing -- or for the plethora of earnest, skillful imitations that grace calendars, greeting cards and the walls of small-town galleries across the West today.

Great, forested canyons slung with railroad bridges; vast, rocky, desert vistas; dark tunnels blasted into towering cliffs -- majestic landscapes in the stoic, stately tradition of those who charted the territory first, handsomely composed in sharp, dusty duotones.

Embedded in this homage, however, is a brilliantly simple conceptual twist, apparent after a moment or two of close observation: Each image centers upon the overgrown path of an abandoned train line, the name of which is faintly inscribed on the mat below the image. The photographs are installed in thematic groupings: a pair of crumbling bridges; a trio of tunnels; a grid of 15 images depicting paths through canyons blasted into hillsides and 12 more of lines existing as barely discernible mounds across an open plain.

The latter grouping is the most subtle and perhaps the most powerful, charged with a pathos that encompasses a sense of both awe and futility.

Nevada Central. Mohave and Milltown. Arizona and Swansea. The names evoke not merely a bygone era of transportation but, as the show's title suggests, the vision of an empire. As America shifts now into another era, toward another vision, one with a necessarily different concept of space, nationality, our place in the world and our relationship to nature, their spectral presence in Ruwedel's images is haunting.

Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave., B2, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through Dec. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.



Youthful artist needs seasoning

The cult of youth is a mysterious thing. Its prevalence in the art world is both unfortunate and inevitable, but if it serves any purpose, one would hope it would be to liven things up a bit: to seek out the flashy, the sexy, the impertinent -- artists with the audacity, say, of a Terence Koh, or the flamboyance of a Rosson Crow.