SANTA MONICA

An assembly of three solo shows devotes primary space to a predictable batch of David Furman’s ceramic sculpture that throws most of its energy into trying to make clay look like something it isn’t. Furman makes chalk boards, complete with sticks of chalk and erasers; drawing boards with drawings taped to them; tin cans stuffed with brushes and pencils, and cups with pencils and erasers on their saucers. Every scrap of these artworks--including the “masking tape”--is made of glazed or painted clay. Having said our last “Gee whiz” over the verisimilitude of trompe l’oeil ceramics a long time ago, we’re left to muse on the deep meanings of such phrases as “caveat emptor” scrawled on a chalk board or to remark upon the cleverness of drawings that incorporate drawing implements as figures in landscapes. It isn’t much, but it’s all she wrote in this exhausted genre.

Meanwhile miniaturist Richard Pettibone shows old work that still looks interesting, plus a recent update. All of it pays homage to the late Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. Playing with the idea of endlessly reproducing a commercial image while making it ever more precious, Pettibone apes Warhol on 5-by-7-inch canvases. In a 1962 series, he treats the image to different colored backgrounds, smudges it and pushes it off-register, as if to exert the artist’s presence in the sphere of mechanical reproduction and to prove that he has as many interpretations up his sleeve as Campbell’s has flavors. In another 1962 work, a can of soup becomes “a valuable art object” about to be run over by a train. Pettibone’s latest word on the subject is a set of 32 tiny silkscreened and oil-painted canvases that come with a neat wood storage box. You can hang them on the wall to display all the flavors or stash them away like the good silver.

Completing the trio, Robbert Flick surprises us with a room full of small black-and-white photographs of landscapes--after a period of working with mural-size panoramas. Some new works continue to present multiple fragments of the same locale as gridded mosaics; others are single images. Either way, Flick draws us into the slightest nuances of nature, as perceived through the camera, and sets us to thinking about the nature of visual experience. Among other intriguing things, he points out how we piece things together and accept disconnected bits as a complete picture. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to July 11.)