ART REVIEWS : A Trip Into Mind of Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon’s work-in-progress at Regen Projects is a homemade library that doubles as a misguided diary and a skewed tour of odd monuments from literary history. The continually changing installation is also a perverse, lucid trip through the labyrinthine mind of an exceptionally talented artist.

It takes a little time to fall into sync with the off-balanced rhythms of Pettibon’s thinking, but eight stately leather chairs around a solid oak table provide your body with the necessary comforts: Your mind remains free to float out of its work-a-day habits and follow the free-wheeling leaps and hallucinatory coincidences that animate the artist-author’s eccentric story-boards.

Paging through Pettibon’s seven hand-written, hand-painted picture-books is initially confusing. The scrawled phrases and swiftly sketched images begin to form sensible narratives, only to abruptly break off or pointlessly meander from one minor detail to another incidental comment.

Surf wisdom, biblical references, quotes from Cicero and Nathaniel Hawthorne freely intermingle with metaphysical musings, paranoid visions and contemporary existential conundrums. Nothing adds up to much more than the mad ramblings of a splintered personality. No controlling persona, privileged point of view or authoritative voice holds Pettibon’s wide-ranging collection of far-flung scenarios and disparate events together.

The confusion you feel, however, eventually subsides. Pettibon’s idea of reading is deeply intelligent, profoundly generous and jam-packed with insights. When it becomes clear that his borrowed and partially rewritten stories are about the transactions that (potentially) take place whenever we pick up a book, significance multiplies exponentially.

Stories of trust and enslavement become metaphors for our willingness to yield our egos to another’s will, with the goal of reaping rewards we cannot foresee. In the end, it’s impossible to extricate oneself from Pettibon’s open-ended narratives. His rambling gambol through the past and the present fuses fact and fiction, leaving each of us ample room in which to weave our own version of the ongoing quest for meaning.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Dec. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Hard-Edged: Max Cole’s stripe paintings in muted hues of gray and tan rank among the most substantial and significant hard-edged abstractions being made today. If their style seems to hark back to a simpler time, when all that was asked of art was that it be true to itself, the clarity, focus and strength of her images is nothing if not contemporary.

Six mesmeric acrylics on linen at Kiyo Higashi Gallery offer daunting evidence of the 56-year-old, New York-based artist’s consummate skills and obsessive commitments. Like mind-numbing swathes of the most intricately woven and luxurious fabric, Cole’s paintings begin where Agnes Martin’s floating, vaporous grids leave off.

There’s nothing even slightly ethereal, atmospheric or ghostly about the younger artist’s solidly crafted abstractions. Hands-on and tangible, they start with the rich, ribbed feel of cloth upon skin and transform this texture into experiences of almost otherworldly patience and endless fascination.

A typical painting by Cole consists of a repeated pattern of approximately 200 precisely painted horizontal bands of black, white, gray and tan. Each razor-sharp stripe consists of up to 80 meticulously applied layers of paint, or of extremely thin vertical stripes measuring no wider than a single strand of the linen on which it is painted.

The overall effect is of a solid surface on which one’s eyes cannot rest, but across which they continuously and frictionlessly glide. Op Art’s visual manipulations are gracefully tracked back to the textured presences of real substances.

Astonishingly slow, Cole’s paintings require remarkably long periods of time to take in. A strange sense of supple animation enlivens their otherwise immediately evident structures. Visual sensations dovetail with those of touch, transforming order, rigor and impeccability into playful games of generous indeterminacy.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Whispers: The power of understatement reverberates in “On Paper,” a quietly beautiful exhibition at Asher/Faure Gallery. Like whispers, its small, softly hued drawings, photographs and watercolors pull us up close. Thus captivated by the art of Vija Celmins, Judy Fiskin, Agnes Martin and Ellen Phelan, we are rewarded with intimate, often exquisite details that feel as if they’re addressed to no one but ourselves.

None of the pieces in this inspired, idiosyncratic and seductive group of works from the past 30 years gives away any secrets easily. Each tests our capacity to meet it on its own, often tough terms. Here, we sometimes reveal more of ourselves than see what’s right in front of our faces.

Martin’s tiny grids scrutinize our ability to discern the subtle rhythms that seem to breathe out of the empty spaces between wire-fine lines. Fiskin’s miniature black-and-white photographs of desert landscapes trick us into thinking that the harsh, natural world is a land of make-believe, into which we must project our fantasies if anything is to mean more than the obvious.

Celmins’ stunningly meticulous drawings of pebbles, stars and clouds invite us to wonder about what happens to the self when we enter states of intense concentration. And Phelan’s ghostly landscapes delicately probe our memories and prod the vacant spaces of forgetfulness.

“On Paper” adds up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The work of these four women suggests that a little mystery goes a long way in art, and that intuition brings us insights that our intellects may never comprehend.

* Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Old Ideas: New technology dresses up old ideas in David Dalzell’s first solo show. But, the microchip doesn’t save uninventive thinking from falling flat on its face. After the gee-whiz fascination of his audiovisual installation wears off, there’s not much left to wonder about other than the yawning gap that separates high-tech gadgetry from contemporary art.

At Detroit Gallery, Dalzell has suspended four tiny video monitors over maps of Los Angeles that have been push-pinned to the wall. As sounds of L.A.’s street-life play over hidden speakers in the dimly lit space, videos taped near the Hollywood sign, a freeway interchange, Forest Lawn Cemetery and the Fairfax District’s Farmers Market play on each of the two-inch-square screens.

We watch as mundane urban scenes unfold. Cars change lanes and exit freeways. Customers shop for bargains. Pedestrians cross intersections. Indistinguishable gravestones reach to the horizon.

Although seemingly infinite potential abounds in Dalzell’s undeveloped work, his installation suggests that all of his creative energy was spent pursuing technological effects, leaving little for aesthetic concerns.

His work acknowledges the burgeoning presence of “virtual reality,” as it insists on the importance of locating ourselves in an increasingly complicated world. But without more meditation on art’s influence on science, Dalzell’s work delivers little more than a cold demonstration of technology’s current capacities.

* Detroit Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 624-3509, through Dec. 18. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.