Art Reviews : Photos Capture L.A.’s Artificial Reality

John Humble’s super-saturated photographs give gorgeous visual form to the unnatural beauty of Los Angeles.

At Jan Kesner Gallery, 16 color prints depict the sprawling city as a vast spider web of power lines, railways and streets. In this network of electricity, steel and concrete, people are trapped like helpless insects.

But Humble’s crystal-clear pictures are not one-dimensional critiques of L.A.’s inhuman artificiality. Neither are they giddy celebrations of sunshine, stardom and seduction. They reflect, instead, a deep ambivalence about the city, fusing sharp contradictions in stunning compositions.

Humble masterfully exploits Southern California sunlight to hold his photographs together. He takes most of his pictures on clear days in the late afternoon, when the light is brightest and the shadows darkest.

These harsh contrasts dramatically flatten things out. Buildings appear to be no more substantial than billboards. Houses, trailer homes, smokestacks and telephone poles seem to be silhouettes. Even the downtown skyline looks like a backdrop for a movie.

The best photos make L.A. appear to be an exceptionally realistic set. Some images have the presence of collages, of single pictures made of many others cut-and-pasted together. This ad hoc, part-by-part construction captures an essential aspect of L.A.’s artificial reality.

Almost nothing remains of the natural environment that was here prior to the construction of the modern metropolis. Concrete and blacktop have totally replaced the scrub and sand of the desert. The Los Angeles River is a cement ditch. Most of the trees and foliage have been imported.

Even the sky, in Humble’s pictures, is marked by artifice. When it’s not thick with orange smog, it’s crisscrossed by trails of jet exhaust, broken into grids by the armatures of billboards and divided into sections by towering chimneys. Miles of electrical lines slice it into irregular geometric shapes.

Like the rest of the urban landscape portrayed by Humble’s photographs, the sky is at once overcrowded and empty. When people appear in the color-drenched environment he vividly depicts, they seem isolated and insignificant, crowded-out by their surroundings.

It is as if the man-made landscape leaves very little room for humans, but plenty of space for dazzling, anonymous beauty. Humble’s art thus captures the sense in which L.A. is simultaneously nightmare and paradise, a hallucinatory mix of banality and sunshine.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through July 9. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

* Explicit Miniatures: Judie Bamber’s three jewel-like paintings at Richard Telles Fine Art are the most powerful works she has made. Measuring slightly more than 6-by-2-inches, they’re also her smallest. Each is a lovingly rendered, exquisitely glazed, life-size close-up of a woman’s genitals.

From across the long, narrow gallery, Bamber’s oils-on-panel (which are nearly as thick as they are wide), appear to be small objects affixed to the wall. A viewer has to get fairly close to determine what they depict. And get very close to see how masterfully they’re made.

You can’t help but relish their painterly virtuosity. Bamber handles her medium with aplomb. It’s obvious that every square centimeter (and fold) of flesh has had hours of attention lavished upon it.

These sumptuous paintings spring from strange sources. Bamber combines the detail of 15th-Century Dutch still-lifes with the scale of 5th-Century B.C. Persian miniatures. Her tightly cropped vulvae also draw upon the 8th-Century Hindu Kamasutra and contemporary pornography. Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” a crotch-shot painting from 1866, looks practically Puritan in comparison.

Bamber’s art explicitly recalls Zoe Leonard’s black-and-white photographs of female genitalia, which she exhibited between pre-Modern paintings, often of female nudes. Reproduction, Bamber’s stripped-down pictures reveal, has more than one meaning. Sometimes it’s related to the seemingly biological demand to perpetuate the species, or at least to go through the motions of doing so. At other times it’s more closely connected to the multiplication of images.

The give-and-take of pleasure is at the root of both activities. Passion grounds both life and art.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through June 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

* Topsy-Turvy World: Explosions of lurid color combine with eye-grabbing patterns in Carole Caroompas’ spunky paintings at Sue Spaid Fine Art. Visually, nothing is subtle in these aggressive amalgamations of dumb cartoons, simplified diagrams and pilfered movie stills.

Caroompas leaves subtlety for the ideas and feelings her hefty acrylics-on-canvas generate. Her new paintings function most powerfully as after-images: Once emblazoned in your mind’s eye, they continue to resonate and mutate.

The five works here belong to the ongoing series “Before and After Frankenstein: The Woman Who Knew Too Much.” In the topsy-turvy world Caroompas injects into your head, the battle between the sexes gets increasingly twisted and demented.

The biggest (and best) painting centers on two scenes from the B-movie “Frankenhooker” and an image of a donkey with an erection. One actress chops cabbage while another fondles a man’s head as she stares longingly at a brain in his lap. About a dozen larger-than-life, trompe l’oeil bones frame these blue and green pictures. Four giant wide-open mouths, apparently waiting for some painful dentistry, dance across the bottom.

Clear-cut oppositions between victimizers and victims are out of the question in these loaded explorations of psychological complexity. With vigor and unpredictability, Caroompas layers meanings and scrambles cliches in dizzying mixes.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through June 26. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

* A Glimpse of Faces: Visiting the exhibition “Studio Visits: Photographs of California Artists by Jim McHugh” is a lot like thumbing through a stack of baseball cards. You get to see nearly 50 of your favorite art stars posing seriously or casually, in their studios or in more formal settings.

This pleasant fund-raiser for the Santa Monica Museum of Art gives fans a chance to glimpse the faces behind the art. It invites viewers to speculate about how the personalities of the artists might match up with the paintings, sculptures and installations they make.

Which is where McHugh’s own artistry as a portrait photographer comes in. It is his job to convince viewers that his pictures reveal more of the artists’ selves than their own works normally disclose.

In general, he’s pretty successful: Almost all his photographs present characters whose demeanor and attitudes obviously complement characteristics present in their work. The movement from private self to public persona goes smoothly in “Studio Visits,” providing just the type of packaging fund-raisers demand.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433, through June 26, Closed Sundays and Mondays.