HALVERSON: Photos Update a Grand West : Broadening the Spectrum of a Minimalist

Sensual colors and caressable textures are not qualities for which the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd (1928-1994) is best known. At PaceWildenstein Gallery, however, 10 beautifully installed, mostly multi-part works made between 1988 and 1993 go a long way to emphasize the sheer loveliness of an oeuvre usually celebrated for its anti-illusionistic rigor, no-nonsense logic and “kick it, it’s real” materialism.

In Judd’s late works, color and surface are no longer relegated to supporting roles; they function on equal terms with the geometric structure of each handsomely proportioned piece. Walking into the gallery’s otherwise clunky main showroom feels like stepping into a rainbow that has been carefully dissected and neatly arranged in solid boxes made of gorgeously rusted steel, softly anodized aluminum or smoothly sanded plywood.

The open faces of these perfectly fabricated containers, all but two of which are wall-mounted, reveal sheets of plexiglass that appear to be pools of exquisite color in a wide range of hues and varying degrees of translucence. Under some, the wall seems to dissolve into luscious immateriality; beneath others, the plywood’s grain looks like rippled beach sand gently licked by small waves.

Although Judd is also known as a writer who was convinced, since the 1960s, that painting was finished, his late sculptures share so many qualities with painting that it’s shortsighted to miss their paradox.

Like monochrome paintings in deep frames, Judd’s pieces strive to give you something to look at that’s out of this world. Available in a seemingly inexhaustible variety of sizes, arrangements and color combinations, they rival the selection at wholesale furniture outlets, generously providing for the vagaries of personal taste and the requirements of diverse environments.

Simultaneously pragmatic and decorative, Judd’s art combines the try-it-yourself ethos of American empiricism with the romantic hope that art might beautify life. Their power is physical as well as visual: Never has this gallery’s weighty architecture felt so wide-open and expansive.

* PaceWildenstein Gallery, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Saturday.

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Mighty Colorado: Karen Halverson’s supersaturated color photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery update the grand, panoramic pageantry of the American landscape by unsentimentally depicting the awesome mountains, valleys and plains spanned by the Colorado River. Cutting a 1,700-mile course through six states and two countries, this vital waterway is punctuated by six major dams (including the Hoover), dozens of reservoirs and several gigantic, man-made lakes, like Powell and Mead. It’s also the site of myriad water sports, parks, promenades and picnic areas.

Halverson’s bold, 2 1/2-by-3 1/2-foot pictures eschew the simple “nature-is-good, civilization-is-bad” moralism of much documentary photography. For every fertile valley filled with amber waves of grain the peripatetic photographer captures on film, she includes a bevy of awkwardly bobbing houseboats. Each towering canyon wall is likewise balanced against an endless string of electric towers. Most majestic vistas are juxtaposed with rows of plastic pool furniture, distant oil wells, metal umbrellas or transplanted palm trees.

Lush and realistic, Halverson’s best chromogenic prints do not oppose nature and culture. Instead, they suggest that every individual is simultaneously dwarfed by the natural environment’s unfathomable vastness and by the massive, mind-boggling feats of post-industrial engineering that crisscross this terrain.

A sense of humor softens the absurdity evinced by Halverson’s photos, especially the one in which a scrappy golf course lies behind a synthetic fence at the edge of a cliff that drops precipitously to a river below. Farther in the background, radio towers, an electricity generation plant, a canyon-spanning bridge and a dam are all set in a dazzling landscape of purple mountains, crystalline rivers and shimmering lakes.

In this picture, nothing is more natural than anything else. Rejecting the still prevalent 19th century idea that people don’t belong in the landscape, Halverson’s art shows the world as it is: a terrifying and impersonal vastness in which life as we know it hangs precariously in the balance.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.