ART REVIEWS : Optical Game of Moving Colors

John McCracken’s new paintings look nothing like the minimalist poly-resin sculptures he has been exhibiting since 1965. But appearances don’t tell the whole story. Although his six oils-on-canvas at L.A. Louver Gallery mark a departure in terms of materials, they don’t signal a change in McCracken’s purposes. The 58-year-old artist’s paintings continue his formal exploration of the relationships between sight and movement, light and volume.

The shift from sculpture’s three dimensions to painting’s two was hinted at four years ago when McCracken started mounting his sculptures on the wall. He distorted and warped his trademark floor-bound and pedestal-based works, exaggerating their eccentric forms. The resulting shelf-like wedges took over painting’s place but still functioned like sculptures.

They forced their viewers to walk around them, to examine their angled planes from many different points of view. Little by little, you were able to piece together a coherent picture of the ways their various planes intersected. From certain angles, their impeccably polished monochromatic surfaces reflected a shimmering field of light, creating the illusion that their substantial volume dissolved into nothingness or folded back into flatness.

McCracken’s more recent and more traditional paintings transfer this play between plane and volume to an optical game in which keyed-up colors hover in front of others, sometimes seeming to jump off of the picture plane. The physical movement his sculptures required now takes place wholly within your eyes. As you stand still, your eyes are forcefully pulled into the hyperactive fields of restless energy he has painted.

Aggressive Impressionism might best describe McCracken’s new works. Like that early modernist style, his paintings transform one’s field of vision into innumerable, individual marks that seem utterly unrelated to one another. After time, these separate strokes of saturated colors congeal into loose patterns. They define fluid rhythms, travel at various velocities, and eventually settle into the almost otherworldly stillness for which McCracken’s abstract sculptures are known.

John McCracken at L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 27, closed Sundays and Mondays.

Provocative ‘Pleasures’: Getting someone’s attention on Hollywood Boulevard isn’t easy. The three artists who have installed window displays in the vacant Newberry School of Beauty meet this challenge with considerable skill. Amid the hustle and bustle of the seedy street, their works function like well-placed booby traps.

When you first see them, the storefront installations by Carol Ashley, Judie Bamber and Andrea Bowers make you wonder what they could possibly be advertising. As you continue to walk down the street and their images reverberate in your memory, you realize that the artists have sabotaged your capacity to filter out the overwhelming visual bombardment of our urban environment.

All of its billboards, advertisements and eye-grabbing displays suddenly seem especially strange, as if they too might be tricks to get you to think rather than to simply buy things.

Selected by artist Lauren Lesko for Nomadic Site’s yearlong series of roving exhibitions, the window displays in the building that may soon be LACE’s new home run the grunginess of the street together with the false perfection of commercial advertisements. Titled “Private and Public Pleasures,” they also mix the personal attention we usually reserve for art in galleries with the quick glances we usually use to read outdoor ads.

Bowers’ contribution consists of a tub of pink cotton candy that has been splattered all over the inside of the entrance to the Beauty School. Like a 3-D Expressionist painting made from sugar and artificial coloring, “Sweet Tooth” is a subversive temper tantrum. Its nastiness captures the desperate, dreams-gone-bad aura of many of Hollywood’s derelict shops.

Bamber’s “Tunnel of Love” delivers exactly what most ads only implicitly promise. Her solitary, vibrating sex toy on a pedestal strips advertising down to its hardly subliminal bottom line. Ashley’s “Look the Other Way” begins to sketch a picture of lesbian desire but its chalkboard story takes too long to read and its miniature TV screen gets lost in the glare of the sun and the motion of the street.

As a group, however, the three displays are greater than the sum of their parts. Lesko’s selection provocatively uses the anonymity of advertisements to sneak inside the minds of unsuspecting passersby.

“Private and Public Pleasures,” Storefront Installations at 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 850-7518. Through March 31. Recycling: In a new batch of collages at Margo Leavin Gallery, Alexis Smith continues to recycle cliches and stereotypes with the wit, whimsy and wisdom that have characterized her art for the past two decades. Her generously open-ended, mini-narratives are some of the most accessible and resonant being made today. They use common, modest materials to find, in worn-out forms, unexpected poignancy and charm.

“Soap” efficiently maps the territory in which Smith’s pun-filled art operates. This simple piece consists of a typewritten letter from one sister to another concerning their sick mother, a newspaper summary of an action-packed soap opera, and a wrapper from a name-brand bar of soap.

Smith juxtaposes these elements not to mock the family tragedy, nor to ridicule the silliness of daytime TV, but to show that what gives any art its power are the associations its viewers bring to it.

In her radically democratic approach to meaning, each viewer’s recollections and expectations play a pivotal, central role. Smith’s collages are really abstract, one-act story-boards that leave plenty of room for any viewer to mobilize their own fantasies, improvising and ad-libbing as they please.

“Cryptic Message” goes even further, suggesting that our identities are not private, unfathomable entities, but ad hoc patchworks temporarily pieced together from common cultural leftovers. What initially looks like two neat rows of trinkets--including a sea horse, a matchbook and a jigsaw-puzzle piece--actually spells out Smith’s name.

Her inviting works begin with the knowledge that stereotypes are only empty abstractions until we bend and manipulate their formulas, reinventing ourselves as we go along.

Alexis Smith at Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through April 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Fabricated ‘Nature’: Jean Lowe’s two-room installation at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is a low-tech, high-energy send-up of late 18th-Century French interior decoration. It is also a playful commentary on our contemporary inability to distinguish between nature and culture. Titled “Real Nature: Accomplishments of Man,” the San Diego-based artist’s elaborately theatrical work ranks among the best exhibitions LACE has organized in the past few years.

Walking into the lavishly altered gallery is like entering a slice of history. Lowe’s piece of the past, however, is more stage set than reality. At once comfortingly familiar and troublingly alien, you feel as if you’ve stumbled into a cheesy--and deadly accurate--rendition of the present.

Lowe has fabricated this warp in time by painting cardboard chairs, papier-mache vases, canvas rugs, faux-marble busts, cheap curtains and fake frames with excessive decorative flourishes and pictures of modern science and industry. Paintings of a massive dam, an endless cattle-yard, irrigated crops that reach to the horizon, tract housing marching over hills and a freeway that leads into the sunset highlight her tongue-in-cheek celebration of our increasingly artificial world.

Her installation is engaging because it refuses to romanticize the idea that nature is whatever culture doesn’t touch. Rather than preaching to its viewers about how unnatural society often seems, Lowe’s life-size piece of theater makes us feel as if we’re tourists in our own cities, never exactly sure where we are, and always curious to find out more about what everything means.

“Real Nature: Accomplishments of Man,” at LACE, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650, through March 28.