Discovering Joy in Colorful ‘Big Picture’

The smallest painting in Monique Prieto’s buoyant exhibition at ACME Gallery ranks among the spunkiest she has made. Composed of only six eccentric shapes of crisp color, this multipurpose picture compresses into 18 by 14 inches of raw canvas no less than four genres of painting: portraiture, still life, landscape and Modernist abstraction.

On first glance, Prieto’s playful composition looks like a jaunty offshoot of an early Jules Olitski. Having sharpened the edges of the spray-painted blobs that punctuate the Color-field painter’s quirky canvases, Prieto has also rendered these loopy shapes in uniform hues and shrunk them down to size, transforming their overblown aspirations into a goofy, user-friendly cartoon.

As a result, her Pop abstraction is as jubilant as any mid-career painting by Tom Wesselmann. Titled “Losing Ground,” its palette exactly matches the one Wesselmann employed to depict a suite of radically cropped nudes reclining resplendently in the foreground of gorgeous seascapes.

Depending upon which shape you focus on in Prieto’s compact painting, the overall image seems to depict different subjects. If the vase-shaped, peach-colored configuration toward the bottom dominates, the painting reads as a still life of stylized flowers. If the golden crescent near the top holds your attention, the work resembles a portrait of a languid, blue-eyed blond. And if the swatch of sky blue that rests on a horizontal section of dark blue grabs your eye, the slippery image looks like a traditional--if strangely framed--seascape.

The remaining nine paintings in Prieto’s impressive exhibition similarly shift between abstraction and representation. With great efficiency and deftness, they demonstrate that neither type of image-making tells the whole story. Impossible to pin down with any certainty, the zany shapes in these subtly colored works exaggerate and intensify the ambiguities on which all visual art is based.

Titled “The Big Picture,” Prieto’s show insists upon the repressed Pop edginess of Color-field painting. This devilishly clever maneuver reveals that redeeming the most derided style of Modernist abstraction is infinitely more interesting than criticizing its shortcomings.

Although knowledge feeds into Prieto’s lively recycling of art history’s dullest moments, pleasure predominates in this process. You don’t have to know the sources of her smart, generous pictures to have fun looking at their exuberant, animated compositions.

* ACME, 1800-B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Life Metaphors: Last year, after Tim Ebner had turned his back on a decade of highly celebrated abstractions and struggled through a series of awkwardly figurative images, he made an amazing body of work. This year, the L.A.-based painter has raised the stakes of his tragicomic pictures, keying up their open-ended drama and expanding their emotional range.

The stuffed animals, puppets and cartoonish humans in these increasingly complicated oils on canvas at Rosamund Felsen Gallery are at once jaded and innocent. Simultaneously arch and ordinary, Ebner’s imaginary menagerie of creatures, beasts and playthings seems both more and less human than people.

Most of the costumed bears, toy soldiers, orange elephants and bright green fish appear to be merely going through the motions of living. It’s as if all the characters in Ebner’s dreamy narratives are too dispirited to muster enough effort for the real thing, yet too clueless to try anything else.

But you can’t really blame them for failing to measure up to human standards. After all, they’re inanimate objects, not sentient beings.

As a group, Ebner’s bumbling creatures stand in as powerful metaphors for the art of painting. Like the dumb puppets they depict, his canvases are lifeless substances into which the artist has tried to infuse some kind of living vitality.

In the end, it’s irrelevant whether or not the characters in the pictures seem lifelike or real. What counts are the emotional responses they elicit from viewers.

And that’s exactly where Ebner’s paintings succeed. They hide the complex sentiments of grown-ups behind images as familiar and innocent as those found in children’s coloring books. Tugging at your heartstrings while triggering a touch of trepidation, these loaded works are also metaphors for life.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.