Taking an Intriguing Look at Three Distinct Visions

At Richard Telles Fine Art, new works by Pae White, Richard Hawkins and Ginny Bishton look good, if completely disparate.

Bishton continues to be one of the younger L.A. artists to watch. Her tightly compressed drawings and constellations of tiny photographs are (to use an embarrassing but still useful word) intense. Her piece here is more overtly luscious: a massive collage of photographs of crumpled items of brightly colored and patterned clothing. Climbing from floor to ceiling and layered so that the uneven edges are themselves bits of concrete poetry, Bishton’s photographs of her wadded-up thrift store finds incarnate innocence and obsession all at once.

Hawkins’ array of pinup-style photos of a young David Cassidy look-alike, downloaded from the Internet, are more blatantly fetishistic. With their uneven, blurred surfaces, they insist upon the kind of distance that flames desire. While they recall the latest spate of Calvin Klein advertisements, they are as hungry as those images are coy.

White’s small mobiles have been shown to better advantage, but they manage to hold their own here. Like the whole of this artist’s work, these are experiments in balancing grace with irony. With a nod to Alexander Calder, Jean Arp and designer colors, they make you nostalgic for the warmed-over Modernism you never would have dreamed you desired.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through June 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Feminine Forms: “Max Weber’s Women,” a large show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, surveys the compelling but uneven work of this renowned American Modernist. Unlike his contemporaries John Marin, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, Weber remained attracted to the figure--the female figure, primarily--throughout a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century.

The show’s catalog essayist, Percy North, asserts that for Weber, women were “emblems of signification rather than objects of desire,” but the disclaimer is hardly necessary. It is absurd to apologize for, say, a painting as lovely as Weber’s early “The Young Model,” in which the figure’s softly outlined curves play off of the rectilinear composition, while jolts of bright color--a bedspread, a blue cloth--make her pale skin look translucent.

The show is dominated, however, by Weber’s dreary attempts to work through Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne. Far more provocative are the idiosyncratic moments: a remarkable sketch of Isadora Duncan performing onstage, which consists of nothing but a flurry of lines that somehow suggest both velocity and languor, and a late painting of a woman seen from behind, which despite conjuring the theatricality of Japanese erotic art, is as close as Weber ever got to pure abstraction.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.