Santa Monica

Playfulness of Perejaume: Catalan artist Perejaume makes playful but thoughtful objects that reexamine comment on painting by looking at some of its elements. Perching frames on mountain tops to literally frame nature, he then cuts up documenting photos and recombines them in an unending roundelay of representation. Other gilded frames contain photographs of “paintings” but the photographic painted image has been replaced by a thick juicy layer of the real thing. Clever, a painting within a painting that ostensibly was only a representation of a painting. It all gets very convoluted but that’s the fun.

There’s a lot of good-natured earnestness in the way the artist subverts definitions of painting. The thickly rendered words, “Oil on Canvas,” take on a whole new ramification because they are brushed directly on the cement floor of the gallery. A huge trapeze stretching from the ceiling and hanging limply on the floor, questions the entire problem of trying to contain and define art. In the midst of all the art-about-art rhetoric being touted in print and on gallery walls, it’s nice to see work that makes the repartee so enjoyable. (Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, to March 31.)