ART REVIEWS : Mixed-Media Homage to a Black Martyr : Kerry James Marshall mines history and folklore to build a visual vocabulary around the motifs of black folk art. Several of his paintings are in tribute to Nat Turner.

Born in Birmingham, Ala., schooled at Otis/Parsons in Los Angeles and currently living in Chicago, artist Kerry James Marshall takes America’s black history and folklore as the central theme in his mixed-media work. Several of the 13 paintings that compose Marshall’s current show at the Koplin Gallery in Santa Monica pay homage to Nat Turner, an American slave who was hanged in 1831 for leading an insurrection that resulted in the killings of 57 whites. Turner believed he had been divinely chosen to lead his people out of bondage, but “Turner’s Rebellion” led to increased restrictions for blacks. Nonetheless, Turner is regarded as a martyred hero by many anti-segregationists.

“Portrait of Nat Turner on Loan From Hell” centers on an image of a visibly weary black man wearing a halo; to complete the portrait, Marshall has collaged the canvas with Harlequin romance novel covers illustrated with idealized drawings of white women (they all look like Grace Kelly). In “Nat-Shango” Turner’s been cast as an avenging angel--we see him standing before a felled tree wielding two axes and surrounded by a constellation of Harlequin blonds--while “The Face of Nat Turner Appeared in a Water Stain” is a droll turn on the Shroud of Turin. Those paperback blondes turn up again in “You Must Suffer If You Want to Be Beautiful” and “Destiny Is a Rose,” portraits of voluptuous black women surrounded by book covers depicting slender white women.

Like Alison and Betye Saar and Robert Colescott, Marshall builds his visual vocabulary around the motifs of black folk art. There’s little pictorial depth in his pictures, and his forms are flat and crudely rendered in intense colors. As with much Outsider art (a term describing work by unschooled artists who operate outside of the art world), Marshall tends to “decorate” every inch of his canvases.

Marshall pulls off quite a balancing act with these paintings. Visually, they’re immensely pleasing--solidly composed, sensual and full of arcane bits of information. At the same time, one needn’t look too hard to see that Marshall views his black heritage with a mixture of pride, rage and despair, and those feelings complicate the work, as well as our response to it.

In an adjoining gallery is a series of Western landscapes by Los Angeles artist Christopher Warner. Painting in a loose, impressionistic style, Warner pays homage to those ubiquitous stretches of ugly terrain most of us train ourselves not to see; dry, concrete drainage ditches, polluted beaches, the outskirts of towns where rusting refuse has been shoved and forgotten (the outer edges of our cities function like junk closets in cluttered houses). Warner paints these scenes--which essentially represent human failure--with an extremely tender touch and imbues them with a shimmering beauty that’s slightly surreal. In depicting ravaged patches of land where nature struggles to hold its own against the trashy hand of man, Warner could be described as an ecological propagandist, but that wouldn’t be accurate. In fact, he’s simply painting the world the way it looks in the late 20th Century.

Koplin Gallery: 1438 9th St., Santa Monica; to March 30; (213) 319-9956. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

In Dreams: “From the moment figurative painting lost its rational basis--its documentary and reproductive function--to photography, it was left with just an aura. Surprisingly, its aura has proven to be enough,” says Suzanne Caporael, a painter who knows a thing or two about aura. As can be seen in an exhibition of new paintings at the Richard Green Gallery in Santa Monica, Caporael’s work revolves almost entirely around the evocation of mood. And, the mood she most often invokes is one of anxiety and mystery.

Caporael’s vocabulary of forms seems to spring from the world of dreams, and thus her work invites Freudian and Jungian readings; she positions and renders forms in such a way that they resonate with inexplicable significance, and her paintings (which she shows in weighty black wood frames) have a heaviness that’s almost unbearable. At the same time, they’re as ethereal as fading memories. Caporael handles paint quite deftly, and like Georgia O’Keeffe and Rene Magritte (two artists she alludes to in her sensual interpretation of Surrealism) she gives her paintings a smooth surface skin that’s tight and impenetrable.

With this body of work Caporael moves in a reductive direction. Whereas early paintings revolved around complex, somewhat contrived compositions combining several unrelated elements, these new paintings tend to focus on a single form. Included here are two rather ghostly portraits of horses (these paintings seem to be about a Platonian ideal of a horse rather than any actual flesh-and-blood creature), while other canvases depict snowmen, trees that have been abstracted to the point that they resemble hot-air balloons, and white cups that float like moons through black space. The most arresting works on view are a pair of portraits of Washington and Lincoln that depict the legendary Presidents in a distorted form, as if seen in a fun-house mirror. The woozy, slightly nauseated quality of these paintings suggests that Caporael has ambivalent feelings about the presidency.

Richard Green Gallery: 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica; to April 13; (213) 829-9328. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Avant-Garde Amateur: On view at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Santa Monica is a new series of sculpture by L.A. artist Michael Gonzalez. Small fetish objects fashioned out of industrial materials, Gonzalez’s work could be described as junkyard Minimalism; his materials are cool and innately formal, but what he does with them is kind of funky. A square wall sculpture fashioned out of dozens of key rings, for instance, looks like the work of a Sunday hobbyist (Gonzalez is further like a hobbyist in that he converts unlikely materials into works of art). An untitled sculpture made out of grounding braid (an electrician’s material that resembles a fat straw made of woven metal) involves several small, worm-shaped forms that hang on the wall like giant globs of spit; like most of Gonzalez’s work, it’s an amusingly creepy piece.

Michael Kohn Gallery: 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; to April 3; (213) 393-7713. Closed Sundays and Mondays.