Art Reviews : Little Pictures Frame a Breakthrough

Mark Innerst’s little paintings in large frames at Kohn Turner Gallery are denser and more physical than his earlier cityscapes. Painted in a wider range of colors, with greater tonal variations, sharper contrasts, intensified luminosity and increasingly textured surfaces, they rank among the 36-year-old New Yorker’s best.

In the foyer, two images from 1993 provide an instructive contrast to Innerst’s new paintings. “View Towards Times Square” and “Gordon” depict New York’s skyline as an intangible apparition: Each building’s facade appears to be a flat plane of ethereal color held in place by the pictures’ tight, geometric compositions.

The sky is almost completely cropped from the tops of these images and streets are merely hinted at in the shadows at their bottoms. Inertia, airlessness and claustrophobia are precariously held in check by Innerst’s studious formalism. He seems more interested in the way abstract lines and shapes form pictorial structures than in the substances they depict.

In the main gallery, all this changes as the exhibition splits into two bodies of work. The abstract half, which consists of four blue-and-white patterns, never rises above the level of innocuous decoration. However, seven representational paintings signal something of a breakthrough for Innerst.

The physicality of the city enters these pictures, making them less diagrammatic and more captivating. In “Dirty & Busy & Old,” a solid chunk of impastoed sky, wedged between two towering blocks of buildings, touches down in the street. In a similar untitled piece, a splash of late-afternoon sunlight glistens off distant traffic and picks up highlights in foreground cars otherwise shrouded in shadow.

Innerst’s two largest paintings (measuring about 4 square feet) are even more grounded, gritty and sensual. Their point of view is up-close and hands-on, from where they invite us to glimpse the fugitive beauty of the urban environment. Innerst aligns the pleasures of painting with an unsentimental glance down a busy city street.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through May 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. * Disconnected Explorations: Gail Chase-Bien’s 14 paintings at Caplan Gallery sample freely from art history, referring directly to artists as diverse as Rene Magritte, Chuck Close and Jean Fragonard; to styles as different as abstraction and figuration; and to genres as distinct as landscape, self-portraiture and manuscript illumination.

Film noir horrors, scenes from medieval theater and photographic reproductions also play important roles in these multipanel paintings on canvas and wood. Unfortunately, Chase-Bien’s willingness to quote other subjects is not matched by an equally strong sense of purpose. Her disconnected explorations lack focus and direction.

The problem is not that Chase-Bien attempts to bring far-flung elements into her work. Her paintings fall flat because they’re less interesting than their sources.

Rather than critically challenging established conventions, her images bleed styles and genres of their content, reducing art to a series of easily imitated yet ultimately unsatisfying techniques.

* Caplan Gallery, 2224 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-2170, through June 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.