Conjuring Up Illusions of Enchanting Magnetism

Though always smart, you could hardly call Cameron Shaw’s art playful--until now. At Richard Heller Gallery, this Boston-based artist puts aside his usual repertoire of themes--the duplicity of memory, the ironies of history, the impossibility of self-knowledge--to try his hand at enchantment. This isn’t to say that he’s no longer serious, just that he’s much sneakier about it.

A lighted candle, affixed to the end of a taut, horizontal length of string, is poised in front of a mirror, playing hide-and-seek with its reflection. A disembodied pair of shoes walks upside down across a wooden plank, floating in midair between steps. A coiled rope rises toward the ceiling.

Shaw’s brand of magic isn’t as splashy as David Copperfield’s or as cerebral as Ricky Jay’s. But it certainly gets you to look twice, which is a feat in itself.

Even once you’ve figured out that it’s all done with magnets (artfully concealed, as you might expect), you remain attracted to the illusion or at least to the idea of art as illusion--as stratagem, fantasy, even rapture. If it weren’t already evident that Surrealism figures into this, Shaw throws in enough pipes and black derby hats to make sure Rene Magritte springs to mind.

Art historical pedigree aside, this isn’t a tremendously meaningful body of work, but it’s a lively one, full of possibilities. I will give Shaw this: Without being the slightest bit didactic, he suggests that the now-historic vision of art as transcendence and the Post-postmodern notion of art as entertainment aren’t so very far apart as their champions would insist.

* Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Restless Years: A mid-career survey exhibition of the work of Los Angeles artist Charles Arnoldi is now on view at Fred Hoffman Fine Art, and for fans of the work it’s bound to be a pleasure. Arnoldi is sort of an institution around here, but despite that his art has always been rather restless. Though it’s tempting to call it scattered, I suspect Arnoldi is simply interested in experimentation.

He is best known for his innovative use of wood, which began with the earliest pieces shown here, from the 1970s, in which twigs and sticks were arranged into deliberately wayward grids. They mimic geometric abstractions without coveting their mathematical order.

Later, Arnoldi would smooth, paint and recompose the sticks into much more open compositions. These are immensely fragile and contrast quite dramatically with the compact pieces of the early 1980s, in which the artist scavenged blocky pieces of wood that had been chopped or chain-sawed by local woodcutters and painted them to emphasize their uneven surfaces.

The works of the mid-’80s are three-dimensional and painterly, made with plywood to which the artist has taken a chain saw, splintering the surface and then slathering it with color. It’s difficult to work up any enthusiasm for this phase of Arnoldi’s career, which seems to fall into a “the bigger, the better” trap that has proven disastrous for so many of his generation. Seen in this context, however, these works--along with the most recent bronze sculptures and oil paintings, which are similarly baroque--look as good as they probably ever will.

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* Fred Hoffman Fine Art, 1721 Stewart St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3330, through Aug. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Things of Beauty: You might guess that Jim Hodges’ new installation at Marc Foxx Gallery is composed of equal parts air and art, because the three works in the show don’t seem to occupy the gallery space so much as grace it.

But what can you say about the works themselves except that they are gorgeous? Descriptions fall short, but these beautiful things solicit the effort.

In one corner, a spider web is made of intertwined silver chains, which glisten in the light and then dart out of sight with every passing shadow. Spilling down the center of the room is a curtain-cum-painting, made up of bits and pieces of fabric flowers, leaves and butterflies sewn together to create a sexy, peekaboo effect. Finally, there is a wall drawing of three overlapping sets of concentric circles, whose tentative lines are surprisingly elegant.

And what then? Is there more?

That there doesn’t seem to be is itself instructive. Hodges has perfected a popular new idiom, a kind of Baroque Minimalism in which spectacular effects are doled out sparingly, as if the person in charge preferred not to let on how enamored he was of his own mastery. There’s clearly something duplicitous involved, a certain cowardice even, since Hodges is on to something you know he won’t pursue. But that doesn’t stop you from being seduced; it just makes you feel vaguely guilty afterward.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 3026 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through June 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Reflections: Erik Otsea and Jan Tumlir have been working on a single 4-by-5-foot painting for the past eight years. They paint and repaint its increasingly encrusted surface and photograph its various incarnations--ranging from salon-style history paintings to Constructivist-style abstractions to lonely cartoons--whenever they seem to be “finished.”

The larger project, however, remains unfinished, and to judge from what’s on view at Jan Kesner Gallery, it may be unfinishable. Now that the artists have exhausted the process of accretion, they have begun the process of excavation, looting their custom-designed archeological site for all manner of plunder.

The current show consists of framed photographs of the painting, printed to scale. These reveal that one section of the picture plane has been sanded down so that it appears as if an Adam Ross painting were plopped into its center. They also document the way the painting has been plumbed for core samples, which have themselves been reinserted into the gallery wall and painted over so that nothing goes to waste.

The holes left by the removal of the core samples have been filled with tiny mirrors, which reflect the artists in the process of photographing the painting in its various states. Here, the circularity of the endeavor becomes clear: These are photographs about paintings and reproductions without originals.

The rigor becomes suffocating. While it is impressive that Otsea and Tumlir have consistently labored within the strictest of parameters, it’s beginning to feel a bit too much like actual labor. It may be time to allow for more breathing room because exhausting yourself--much less your audience--certainly isn’t the point.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through July 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.