Ruppersberg Opens Volumes of Narrative Possibility

Unlike most art exhibitions, Allen Ruppersberg’s wide-ranging show at Margo Leavin Gallery invites you to browse. Treating viewers like visitors to a well-stocked (if eccentric) bookstore, the well-known but infrequently exhibited Conceptualist’s drawings, sculptures and paintings let your mind wander as you meander from piece to piece, picking up and perusing whatever strikes your fancy, at whatever pace you please.

In the main gallery, two large-scale arrangements form the centerpiece of the exhibition. Titled “Good Dreams, Bad Dreams, What Was Sub-Literature?” and “Low to High,” they include about 100 re-created books, 20 hand-painted signs advertising titles by various authors, a vitrine of first editions, magazines and comic books, as well as informative displays and a sign announcing a lecture at 4 o’clock.

The colorful signs cover an entire wall, paying homage to the vanishing art of sign painting and pointing to myriad worlds in which readers might get lost. With equal economy, a vitrine of antique texts tells a century-spanning tale of men and women, nature and culture, hope and despair. The 4 o’clock lecture goes on in your head as you become the story’s absent narrator.

Across the gallery, re-created books in Dutch, English, German and Polish are randomly stacked on a wooden stairway that goes nowhere. Commemorating the Battle of Arnhem, as well as history’s disappearance and the power of personal myths, Ruppersberg’s work is matter-of-fact about melancholy. Never sappy or sentimental, it links unimaginable loss to creative imagination.

In two side galleries, drawings of book covers, frontispieces, bookmarks and obituaries similarly interweave loss and possibility. Uniting all of Ruppersberg’s self-effacing works is the democratic desire to get people to spin their own stories.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Light Touch: If light were liquid, the world might look like Juan Usle’s wonderfully light-handed abstractions at L.A. Louver Gallery. Fluid and translucent, the best works in the Spanish-born, New York-based painter’s first solo show on the West Coast are at once sensuous and expansive, as luxurious as a silk chemise and as ungraspable as a summer breeze.

Usle’s small paintings are his strongest. Compressed into their diminutive dimensions are radically fractured grids that don’t divide space as much as measure time, marking it off in drifting rhythms that are, for the most part, casual and relaxed.

Usle paints his idiosyncratic compositions with such apparent ease that they often embody a seductive sense of serenity. “Imagen de lo Contrario,” for example, deploys the immediacy and cleanness of a watercolor with such aplomb that the question of whether you’re looking up at the sky over a beach or down at the ocean beyond the sand is completely irrelevant. The elusive space Usle paints has less to do with the way the natural world looks than how it feels when you’re in sync with its rhythms.

Or out of step with its shifting movements: Other equally compelling images, like “Poppy Moons” and “Fuera Pero Dentro 3,” suggest the disjunctive stutterings of a malfunctioning film projector. As silky and intangible as Usle’s smoother works, these pieces punctuate tranquillity with a touch of giddy dissonance.

The largest paintings, however, introduce awkwardly drawn or gracefully sinuous lines that transform Usle’s exquisite surfaces of liquid light into flat, graphic grounds. “Yonkers Imperator” resembles a cross between Willem de Kooning’s dazzling late paintings and a goofy cartoonist’s depiction of braided hair. These unresolved images attest to the edginess of Usle’s smaller paintings,showing him to be a talented and ambitious artist willing to push beyond the familiar.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Full Circles: Like a giant Spirograph’s circling curlicues, Renee Petropoulos’ doughnut-shaped paintings on paper fill the space around an empty center with dizzying tracery. Simultaneously pretty and rigorous, these abstract patterns at Rosamund Felsen Gallery fuse the immediate appeal of flashy ornamentation with the more slowly unfolding intrigue of perception-testing puzzles.

Each of Petropoulos’ brightly colored images consists of a dozen or more overlapping rings of interlinked ellipses, flowery starbursts and loopy lines. Densely layered and painted in an outlandish palette of bold crimsons, zippy yellows and vibrant lime greens, almost all of these overloaded tondos initially appear to be symmetrical decorations.

The pictures are so jampacked with visual stimulation, it takes more than a few moments to notice that none is centered or consistent. The closer you look, the more out of sync her diagrams look. Few rings are perfectly circular, fewer are concentric and nearly none repeats a predictable pattern for its entire orbit around the blank center.

With style, Petropoulos emphasizes how swiftly our minds organize the chaos of the visual environment, transforming its messy complexities into neat, geometric categories. To see what’s really out there requires that we not only pay attention to the details, but also struggle against the dull habit of seeing new things only in terms of things we’re familiar with.

In an adjoining gallery, Grant Mudford’s taut photos of the Metro Green Line’s Douglas Station (designed by Petropoulos in conjunction with Escudero Fribourg Architects) deploy a similar sense of de-familiarization. Displayed in five modestly scaled light-boxes, Mudford’s crisp transparencies emphasize that the city of Los Angeles is also an odd collage of asymmetrical patterns, and that seeing it from the right angle is as stimulating an experience as looking at challenging art.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through April 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.