ART REVIEWS : A Mother-and-Son Exhibition at Newspace Gallery : Paintings by Frederick Wight and Alice Stallknecht reveal more differences than similarities.

For all those individuals who doggedly try to juggle multiple careers and family, the life and paintings of Frederick Wight are bound to be a bracer. He was a man of intelligence and wide-ranging accomplishment whose dedication to art made a significant mark in the history of Los Angeles art scene. But he was also a painter, a talent fanned undoubtedly by his mother, painter Alice Stallknecht.

Seeing mother and son’s paintings together is a study in contrasts. Although both painted portraits in the ‘30s through the ‘50s, Stallknecht’s style was laced with the linear motion of Van Gogh and the side-by-side pure color visual mixing of the neo-Impressionists. In her portraits, faces were described by color-filled lines so dense they vibrate with a barely containable energy. Hands were fluid, almost putty-like claws, detached and alive. Until the later years when the subject’s agitation finally ignited the rest of the painting, clothes and surroundings were flat, simplified forms of liquid, calm color that amplified the animation of the face.

Next to all this energy, Wight’s portraits and landscapes are far less challenging as paintings. But as portraits their focus is crystalline and incisive. Wight appears to have been less interested in exploring painting’s breadth and more interested in the strength and tenacity of his Depression-era subjects. They’re all straightforward people. They look you right in the eye with a directness born of endurance. Strangely, it is only the empty fields, deserted roads and clothing that puts a date on the image; somehow the visage remains timeless and affecting.

The pairing of these two artists is an interesting aside to the current exhibit of Wight’s painting at UCLA, yet it opens more questions than it answers. Alice Stallknecht remains an enigma here, her career muted by time and the sole context of “mother.”

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Saturday .

Keeping His Distance: Tim Ebner’s latest mixed-media pieces continue his sarcastic approach to simulated painting using industrial materials manufactured to the artist’s specifications. Initially alluring, yet always cold, Ebner draws you into his pieces by alluding to an art vocabulary of rigorous geometric abstraction, but quickly slams the door shut by stopping at outward effect and craft. It’s always intellect rather than emotion that gives this art its kick.

The format of this series is a square form that bends back on the top and bottom pushing the “painting’s” surface away from the wall about six inches. The center of the floating square is a large circular cutout into which is mounted a slick bulging form of some other industrial substance. The materials--terrazzo, plexiglass, leather, cast resin and wood--have all the slickness and ubiquity of a craft fair. It’s an inflection so complete it leaves you with the impression the piece is simply an homage to the surface of a bowling ball or the optic effects in a fish bowl. With Ebner you’re never sure if the underlying critique of art-about-art painting has gone moribund or if his oddball materials have given it renewed vigor.

Karen Carson draws airbrushed collages of cuddly bunnies and babies at the mercy of a hostile milieu. Green plexiglass gives the work a healthy dose of disgust. The drawings are as ornate as the dark purple frames that surround them. But the effect is somber rather than exuberant, lending much needed emotional weight to kitschy images of cute creatures surrounded by dragons and other things that go bump in a toxic night. Turning off the syrup on the messsage by including the violent aura of gang tattoos effectively makes each piece a deft emotional cross section of American society.

“Jeffrey Vallance Presents the Richard Nixon Museum” is a collection of Nixon memorabilia that would make a real, avid collector proud. Perhaps not surprisingly for a nation founded on capitalistic principles, all these election trinkets and over-the-counter political icons render up an interesting understanding of the way Presidents, like all cultural ideals, are bought, sold and trivialized.

Vallance’s “Museum,” complete with its single bookshelf library, flattering and rude presidential portraits, political novelty cabinet, Spiro Agnew Liberty Bell, Nixon doormat, tapes of political speeches and gift shop collectibles, has a caustic, if somewhat unsophisticated, wit. That it contains items common to the real Nixon museum simply points to the thin line separating veneration and vilification when creating effigies.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., to March 9.