Lockhart’s Polished Photos Invite Reverie

Sharon Lockhart’s large color photographs exude the sexy perfection of big-budget photo shoots. At Blum & Poe Gallery, not a hair is out of place among the meticulously disheveled locks of a sleeping brunet or among the matted strands of a greasy-haired blond. Likewise, no shadows fall across the 30-year-old, L.A.-based artist’s taut compositions without adding to their chilly beauty.

Lockhart’s crystalline pictures compel you to see the world through the eyes of a fashion photographer. Looking at these five luscious C-prints makes you feel as if you’re the director of a print advertising company who can’t escape the demands of the job: Your eyes instantly translate everything you see into potential ad copy.

In one untitled image a man stands with his back to you, holding a young girl on his hip as both stare into a mist-shrouded forest. Crisp, wintry light filters through the trees, highlighting the boulders and leaves on the ground. You look there, half expecting to read an advertisement for some kind of life insurance or investment firm.

However, no words appear in any of Lockhart’s photos. Viewers are left to wonder about the narratives surrounding each image, or better yet, to make up their own stories about them. Without texts anchoring one’s reveries to a particular commodity, you’re free to let your mind wander.

Even more than Lockhart’s pictures of people, her landscapes have the presence of empty stages awaiting viewer participation. A snowy field in a blizzard and a towering tree beside a road invite a wide variety of Rorschach-like projections.

What’s most interesting about Lockhart’s exquisite prints is that almost any reasonable story you bring to them seems inadequate to their formal perfection. So precisely composed, painstakingly manicured and obsessively fussed over, these photos are only diminished by specific narratives.

Although loosely based on masterpieces painted by Caspar David Friedrich, Hans Holbein and Jan Vermeer, Lockhart’s photographs seem exclusively focused on their own production value. Their beauty is that of high fashion: Icy and in control, it fascinates by remaining aloof and unattainable, part of reality but just out of reach.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through April 6. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

*

Fluid Movement: Michael Goldberg’s new paintings at Manny Silverman Gallery are less chaotic than his colorfully rambunctious abstractions from the past 10 years. But they’re just as furious. The visual energy they generate is more fluid than abrasive, like a well-practiced, sinuous dance rather than a jumpy, jazzy improvisation.

In place of the thick, wildly striped patterns that seemed to explode across the fragmented surfaces of the 71-year-old artist’s earlier works are translucent layers of paint, increasingly integrated into unified images of impressive complexity. Harmony has replaced cacophony, without compromising the bold visual dynamism Goldberg has always sought in his art.

This second-generation Abstract Expressionist made this lively body of work by incrementally building up alternating layers of oil-stick scrawlings and thick strokes of paint. While they were still wet, he then scraped both away with a wide, knifelike tool, often repeating the process.

All that remains in some places are faint stains in the raw canvas or gestural traces resembling walls with graffiti that have been painted over with colors too light to hide the underlying writing. Other parts recall an oil painter’s palette, on which pure pigments get mixed before they’re applied to a properly finished surface.

Goldberg has titled most of his new paintings after places he knew as a boy growing up in New York City. Although it’s not necessary to know what these references mean to him personally, the allusion to memory is significant. Despite the vigor with which these works are made, they drift rather gently into focus, the way fond memories sometimes float into awareness.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through April 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Tricky Concepts: The works in “Tripwire” at LACE generally do not measure up to the excellent ideas on which this six-artist exhibition is based. Organized by artist and writer Carmine Iannaccone for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, “Tripwire” would be better as two shows--one that seduces viewers and another that entraps them.

As a curator, Iannaccone is interested in art that sneaks up on you. His show aims to display works whose meanings are initially imperceptible but suddenly turn your world around when you get involved with them.

Yishai Jusidman’s five small monochrome paintings succeed because they give you something seductive to look at. The longer you peruse these ghostly images of geishas, the more details you perceive. Thin skins of white paint take on amazing substance.

Jusidman’s pictures are tricky because the harder you look for their nearly invisible figures, the harder it is to discern them. Seeing them fully demands a relaxed sort of attention, one that’s more like catching something out of the corner of your eye than scrutinizing it at the center of your vision.

In contrast, the pieces by the five other artists are visually inert. All that unites the diverse works by Masaharu Hoshino, Janet Jenkins, Michael McCurry, Vally Mestroni and Jeanne Patterson is their desire to play conceptual games, to trigger abstract ideas in your mind without physically stimulating your eyes.

Although “Tripwire” intends to link these two types of work together, it falls short of wedding visual seduction and conceptual entrapment. Most of its artists seem to forget that traps must be baited if they’re to catch anything. As prey, art viewers are unusually wary; we need something good to look at if our attention is to be captured for more than a moment.

* LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 957-1777, through March 30. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

*

Changing Perspectives: Casey Cook’s mod paintings at Richard Heller Gallery revisit the 1960s by putting a zippy, contemporary spin on that decade’s hippie typography, middle-class palette and beleaguered brand of highbrow abstraction. In the young artist’s smart pictures, color-field painting in avocado, mustard, peach and other shades of that era’s kitchen appliances meets the swollen bubble lettering of flower children’s graffiti.

Coming from an artist who isn’t old enough to have experienced these elements of pop culture first-hand (Cook is still in graduate school), her works are tough and timely. Never nostalgic or sentimental, they don’t beg viewers to reminisce about the good old days but to live in the moment.

Cook’s collisions of Warholian drollery and Pittmanesque exuberance indiscriminately embrace all types of design. Her mid-sized paintings on panel are powerfully democratic in that they don’t care where something came from as much as they’re concerned about where one takes it.

Interrupting broad fields of smooth color are coy messages asking viewers just what they’re doing. From a few steps away, these bubble letters appear to be design elements; they’re only legible from up close, where the remainder of the painting extends beyond your peripheral vision.

As a result, Cook’s images constantly shift among more than one reading. They playfully demonstrate that meanings change with one’s perspective, and that historical accuracy is not part of an artist’s job description.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., through March 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.