ART REVIEWS : Wall-to-Wall Pondering of Time’s Passage

The new wall drawing by Sol LeWitt at Regen Projects grows on you slowly. Like his best works, which set up idiosyncratic systems fusing order and randomness, this new piece doesn’t build to a crescendo as much as it slows you down to its pace.

Casual, even relaxed, LeWitt’s seemingly Minimalist installation prompts you to meditate on the subjective nature of time’s passage--how it sometimes seems to fly by and at other times barely crawls along.

“Wall Drawing #494” is composed of 12 thick, irregular black lines that wrap horizontally around three walls of the gallery, covering it from floor to ceiling. The alternating bands resemble the stripes of an undulating flag.

But unlike a flag, LeWitt’s lines never appear to belong to a single sheet of fabric. At no point does one line’s movement echo another’s. Each band seems to trace an independent path along the wall.

Consequently, an overall pattern is never established and the illusion of pictorial depth is eliminated. If you concentrate on the empty spaces between the black lines, you can momentarily trick your eyes into seeing white stripes on a black background, but this standard, figure-ground reversal is incidental to the purpose of LeWitt’s tightly focused work.

It’s more accurate to imagine that the random rises and dips of his lines chart temporal rather than spatial movements. The odd pulses and incremental shifts of LeWitt’s drawing share more with electrocardiograms and graphs than with pictures or emblems.

With typical, light-handed ease, and an impressive economy of means, the New York Conceptualist energizes the actual space you occupy. Stepping into the rectangular gallery is like walking into an abstract painting that’s been turned inside-out. Its loose, formal order feels expansive, not because “Wall Drawing #494” rehearses tired visual conundrums, but because it heightens your sensitivity to time’s various tempos, giving you ample opportunity to follow their myriad rhythms for as long as you like.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 29; by appointment only through August. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Childlike Exhibition: Charmingly demonic, one sculpture in Yoshitomo Nara’s first solo show in the United States hangs from the wall like a taxidermied trophy. Titled “Cub,” this larger-than-life-size head, snugly tucked into a baby-blue hood, looks as if it should be attached to a child’s cuddly plaything or a cartoon’s human infant, certainly not to the body of a hunter’s ferocious prey.

Despite the obvious sweetness of the stuffed creature’s boyish face, its bared teeth form a clenched grin that intimates knowledge well beyond its years. The cub’s cheerfully creepy expression drives home the point that Nara’s naughty personage is laughing under its breath, and at your expense.

The rest of the Japan-born, Cologne-based artist’s debut exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery consists of 20 pastel-colored acrylics on canvas and paper. With titles like “Harmless Girl I and II,” “Monkey Mini,” “Silent Violence” and “There Is No Place Like Home,” each one fleshes out an impression that childhood is filled with more cruelty and melancholy than innocence.

Nara’s simple, flash-cardlike pictures reveal that adults need the illusion of childhood more than children do, as a nostalgic, fantasized escape from the quiet horrors of the work-a-day world they once eagerly anticipated but now feel trapped in. The children in these smart, simplified images look jaded and bored, as if they’re only going through the motions of being carefree and playful to keep up appearances, to allow adults to believe that everything is OK and that life is meaningful.

The queasy power of Nara’s art resides in the sense of resignation you read in the eyes of the kids. Rather than rebelling or expressing rage, these prematurely cynical children remain passive and well-behaved, as if they know that resistance is futile. Convinced that society is too messed up for anyone to make a difference, Nara’s children embody powerlessness in action.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453- 8311, through Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Patterns and Postcards: Franz Ackermann is a young artist from Berlin who makes wonderfully complicated, postcard-size drawings of the neighborhoods he visits. At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 10 of these stylized acrylics and three larger versions marry the tidiness of street maps to the unpredictability of subjective impressions, simultaneously fusing the objectivity of diagrams to the prettiness of Pattern and Decoration painting.

Ackermann begins each work on paper with a series of bike rides on which he gets a feel for a locale, making mental notes of thoroughfares and byways, natural landmarks and urban peculiarities. Like makers of patchwork quilts, he puts together bits and pieces of information until these fragments coalesce into some sort of organic whole.

Ackermann’s abstract representations give equal weight to the way the world looks and to how it feels. When looking at his curious hybrids of external reality and inner experience, it’s impossible to disentangle the lay of the land from his state of mind when he experienced it.

His colorful drawings give physical form to the intangible links between places and emotions. The artist’s plodding, seemingly inefficient map-making is tourism at its best: a peripatetic curiosity that has little faith in second-hand information and insists that every part of the world be experienced up-close and in person.

Two other pieces--a set of three enormous blueprints and a bunch of grapefruit in six glass boxes--are not as intriguing as Ackermann’s homemade maps. The images fascinate because they treat cities as works of art--as gigantic, fabricated structures that are available for interpretation and loaded with an inexhaustible supply of eye-opening experiences that are free to the curious.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.