ART REVIEWS : Buoyancy, Balance in New Works by LeWitt

Sol LeWitt’s newest works are as understated, direct and crisp as any of his geometric wall drawings that played a large part in defining the parameters of Conceptual Art about 25 years ago. His two-room installation at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions is also a landmark for the 65-year-old artist, signaling the graceful convergence of two strands of his stripped-down, light-handed formalism.

As always with LeWitt’s best work, there’s an unmistakable ease, a simplicity to his means that gives his solutions the feel of being “just right.” For the viewer, who doesn’t need to know how LeWitt arrived at his conclusions, this simply means that his art conveys an experience of buoyancy, balance and thoughtfulness. You never come away from it feeling cheated or tricked. On the contrary, it rewards and refreshes at a very basic level.

LeWitt’s first piece consists of a large cube whose dimensions are approximately half of the medium-size room in which it is placed. He has covered the cube and the surrounding walls with broken Styrofoam slabs that have been painted black.

The cube is too big to be a sculpture and too small to hide a secret chamber. It functions as part of a pathway that sandwiches the viewer between vast planes of blackness, which are interrupted by an irregular network of energized white lines, themselves made up of nothing but negative space. The variously sized pieces of Styrofoam resemble massive rocks used for monumental buildings, but their illusionistic weight is neatly contradicted by their exposed edges.

In a larger, sky-lit gallery, LeWitt has similarly arranged Styrofoam fragments in eight large rectangles. Having painted various combinations of their surfaces, inner edges and/or the underlying wall with different colors, he has undertaken a serial exploration that is less systematic than curious, more serendipitous than logically rigorous.

The results are not stunning or earth-shattering, but quietly satisfying. Embodying elements of LeWitt’s trademark three-dimensional structures and signature wall-drawings, his previously unexhibited Styrofoam works mark out a fecund intersection where order and chaos dovetail in a dance of great possibility.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through Aug. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

One’s Own Reality: David Levinthal’s large-format Polaroid prints present a glorious, playful, birds-eye view of the Wild West. In a wide and lively selection of his soft-focused, color-saturated photographs at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, tough gunslingers shoot it out, seasoned ranch hands lasso stallions, lone trappers paddle canoes, ruthless outlaws ambush stagecoaches, savvy Indians hunt buffalo and solitary women wait at home with the children.

The twist to such mythic, stereotypical images is that they’re entirely made up of little plastic toys set on table-tops--amid sand, rubber foliage and model buildings. So obvious in their cheap fakery that they never pretend to stand in for “real” scenes, Levinthal’s props are even too crude to pass as backdrops for unconvincing B-movies.

The reality his fantastic photographs depict, however, is our own. In an age shaped by television and movies, distorted myths and full-blown fantasies naturally have more resonance and power than any supposedly direct or unmediated experience of what we usually think of as real.

Since Romanticism, art has struggled to bring us genuine emotions and true sentiments. Since Modernism, it has emphasized the arbitrariness of its conventions. Levinthal’s charming and charged photographs fuse these apparently contrary impulses. In his art, just because something is fake doesn’t mean it’s false.

Reality, it turns out, is as much a matter of facts and history as it is of fabrications and fantasies. Not only does truth have no monopoly on an image’s capacity to move us, the very idea of the real is made up--shot through with unexamined assumptions, unverifiable beliefs and unreliable memories.

* Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, (213) 667-2000, through Oct. 3. Closed Mondays.

A Mature Debut: The four small monochrome paintings that make up Patricia Moisan’s first U.S. solo show are simply gorgeous. Intimate, potent, compact and expansive, they don’t force you to drop dead in their presence as much as they allow you to lose your mind in their sumptuous surfaces and intensely saturated colors. They transform Angles Gallery’s chapel of an auxiliary show-space into an orgy of visual pleasure.

Moisan makes her paintings by suspending pure pigments in a mix of turpentine-based fluids and fixatives. She then sprays hundreds of slightly uneven coats onto square sections of rubber-backed aluminum. The moisture evaporates almost immediately upon contact, leaving irregular layers of powdery pure color.

These infinitesimal accumulations yield incredibly fragile surfaces constituted by tiny bumps and meandering crevasses, ridge-like protrusions and light-sucking indentations. Uncannily attractive and powerfully absorptive, they have the strange presence of alien taste buds, as if each of Moisan’s paintings were a sensitive, living membrane capable of making extremely subtle discriminations. Her gently stunning abstractions also bear comparison to tiny piles of pollen arranged in some kind of unfathomable, organic order by an obsessive collector.

Moisan’s beautiful, chemically poisonous paintings recall Wolfgang Laib’s ravishing pollen pieces and Gunter Umberg’s delicate black paintings, two slightly older German artists in whose country the 42-year-old American has spent much of the past decade. Her focus and patience have paid off splendidly, giving us one of the most mature debut exhibitions in memory.

* Angles Gallery, 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through July 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Goofy, Smart Paintings: In Linda Burnham’s snazzy paintings, a self-conscious melange of disparate styles and diverse techniques overlap and intersect, but never really settle into resolution or unity.

This sense of incompletion doesn’t signal a weakness in her art, but articulates its sneaky strength. Burnham’s paintings take over the logic of collage, piecing together found objects and elements to form fresh, unanticipated orders.

Her seven humorously titled paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery want to be both goofy and smart. They deftly combine dynamic, calligraphic flourishes with diagrammatic frogs, bugs, eyes and a laughing bear. They also overlay aggressive optical patterns, saccharine sweet pastels, thick swirls of oil, stylized flowers, faded stains, atmospheric washes and crusty layers of buttery resin.

These potentially disjunctive components are not, however, sufficiently disruptive. Although they’ve been effectively used by Sigmar Polke since the ‘60s, they’ve been overused by a generation of his followers. Burnham’s transitional body of work reveals a talented painter reaching beyond what she’s achieved in the past, but not yet grasping what she will in the future.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3383, through July 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.