The Valley

Figurative painter Don Lagerberg rumbles back to exhibition like Harrison Ford being chased by a boulder in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In fact, three large paintings here were inspired by the veteran artist’s recent fascination with movie special effects mixed with myths, both timeless and personal. The most spectacular shows a horn-helmeted Siegfried wielding his ax against a dragon that makes Godzilla look like the Easter bunny while boulders burst from the monster’s cave. The sexiest casts Salome--not Judith--with the severed head of Holofernes, rolling towards us gruesomely from a bloody bowl while flying daggers flit through the air. The most thought-provoking shows a series of skeletons ascending a staircase while Duchamp’s nude descends and King Kong roars in the foreground.

It is a tour de force of painting, fueled with manic energy that feels like somebody got so furious he just had to laugh. It is redolent of mixed metaphors on pop culture, high culture, private jokes, exasperation and admiration for the anonymous wizards that make movie magic with blue screens, traveling mats and multiple exposures.

The show is as sensationally entertaining as “Terminator” and pulses with so many red herrings it is possible to be distracted from the fact that it is an important theoretical move for representational art. Compositions are compounded of separate parts, wooden cutouts, splattered open frames, clear panes carrying painted objects. The net effect is somewhere between watching a 3-D movie and looking at Frank Stella’s recent glittery baroque abstract reliefs.

Lagerberg is still a trifle timid in a few moves, like the flying rocks and daggers, but he is on the brink of boldly going where no figurative painter has gone before.

The artist has tossed off provocative ideas in the past and regarded the suggestion as sufficient. There’s another rich possibility in this crossroads show. Some 15 drawings take the perfectly commonplace idea of the study of the nude model and turn the explosiveness of the painting into a compressed insight that makes a moving experience of an idea-less premise. A male model evokes our simian background, a female our Olympian forebears. Unexpected poses make one girl a compound of sexuality and brooding that would have stopped both Eakins and Lautrec in admiration. Translated into sustained painting, the drawings could make Lagerberg a more idealistic, more American Lucian Freud. As long as the artist works, he doesn’t seem to have a bad option. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to March 25.)