Beyond an Open-and-Shut Case of Paranoia

As far as abstract paintings go, James Fish’s at Blum & Poe are adequate, even appealing, but hardly inspiring. Sort of a cross between Fandra Chang (in terms of their interest in peekaboo layers) and John M. Miller (in terms of their sharp-edged, graphic clarity), these acrylic-on-vinyl images are based upon the grid, intersecting networks of horizontals and verticals.

When it comes to narrative, however, they are more interesting--if a bit trendy. They play out a popular gambit in which abstractions aren’t quite what they seem to be. Geometric compositions these works are not. Instead, they are schematic renderings of sliding glass windows (open, shut and in between) that have been draped with Venetian blinds.

Fish has a nice if unsubtle sense of humor. These are takeoffs on the old picture-as-a-window-onto-the-world idea, but with a heavily ironic, Hitchcockian twist. The titles bear this out: in “Aerophobia” (which the gallery says the artist translates as “fear of drafts”), the window is closed; in “Nyctophobia” (“fear of night”), there is no blind at all, as if in homage to the light of the sun; in “Paranoid,” the blind’s thick black bands all but shut out any view.

What exactly is on view is the other catch. The distinct impression is that it’s us. Perhaps that’s because we see the back sides of the images. In any case, the more you think about this, the more paranoid you become. Considering this is work that misrepresents itself from the outset, that’s probably the point. Not surprisingly, the least successful of Fish’s paintings are those that make things too easy, like the one with a telltale kink in the blinds, though it’s no less charming for its obviousness.

* Blum & Poe, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Sept. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Sole Searching: Doris Salcedo’s new installation at L.A. Louver--the Colombian artist’s first on the West Coast--is stunning, if familiar. Sunk into the walls inside irregular, coffin-like spaces are ladies’ shoes glimpsed through translucent layers of cows’ bladders. Stitched onto the wall with black surgical thread, the bladders are as strange and obsessive as dream screens, playing the same nightmare over and over again.

The installation, called “Atrabiliarios” is a textbook surrealist tableau: fetishistic, fantastic and spookily sexy. Though it enacts an old South American custom--a shoe is left lying around whenever there is a death--it is less a meditation upon a cultural practice than a taste of psychological horror. The story is both crystalline and murky, a la Edgar Allan Poe: The fine thread pierces the wall with clear-eyed ferocity, while the shoes are all but concealed from view.

Salcedo’s imagery is not particularly original; what is unusual is her restraint. One expects this sort of gothic impulse to tend toward the baroque: amplifying the stitched up bladders and the old shoes with, say, photos hanging from micro-filaments, a video component, lugubrious lighting, voluminous wall texts. But Salcedo has resisted the lure of excess and that of spectacle too, winding up with something quite beautiful, and macabre only by implication.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Shifting Gears: At Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions, Steven De Pinto and Walter Cotten’s photographs of classic roadsters on view in the desert are not merely for aficionados of car culture. In fact, car obsessives will probably shudder at the way De Pinto and Cotten crop their images, pushing the cars toward the edge of the frame, and sometimes, abandoning them entirely.

It’s not that Cotten and De Pinto aren’t interested in these fetishized luxury objects, with their high-gloss finishes and sexy curves. They are; but they are also interested in illogical juxtapositions. The sense of time, for example, is askew: The eternity of the desert contrasts with the nostalgia evoked by the cars, not to mention the brute contemporaneity of the spectators, with their campers and six-packs.

It’s interesting to think of these works in terms of the natural beauty of Richard Misrach’s desert or the glassy perfection of Matthew Barney’s imaginary landscapes or the wry humor of Garry Winogrand’s “real world,” in which the one thing everybody else misses is what the photographer sees. De Pinto and Cotten’s work in no way reaches this level of complexity, but it’s engaging and perfect summer fare nonetheless.

* Griffin Linton Contemporary Exhibitions, 915-B Electric Ave., Venice, (310) 452-1014, through Aug. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.