LeWitt’s Paintings: A Wall of Color, Concepts

Sol LeWitt’s new wall paintings, shown for the first time in this country at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, seem excruciatingly simple and common, at least when described on paper: seven 12-foot squares of oil, painted directly onto the wall, one each in red, yellow and blue; one in dark gray, one in light gray; and two in black. Period.

Here is everything that Modernist art would appear to hold dear, concentrated into an essence: monochrome painting, geometric form, heroic scale and modulated repetition. And yet nothing in this installation is predictable--neither its debt to Modernism nor its made-to-order proportions, and least of all its staggering beauty.

Strangely enough, it is beauty we have come to expect from this once-ascetic pioneer of Minimal art. LeWitt’s wall drawings, shown widely since the 1960s, remain unparalleled in terms of refinement and lustrous complication.

Like those works, however, this installation is in principle conceptual. LeWitt created a set of written instructions that, when carried out by artisans, realizes the work of art. Therefore, his brand of monochrome paintings would seem to eschew the kind of soul-searching this kind of art historically required.

Yet his work also couldn’t be further away from that of an artist such as Stephen Prina, whose take on the genre critiqued Modern monochrome paintings as institutionally anointed, cash-quantified spaces of contemplation. LeWitt has no taste for irony.

What his wall paintings do is conceptual, but it is also visceral. These sumptuous expanses of color work as a perceptual ensemble, quite as if they were aftereffects of one another.

Each one feels like a flash of light trapped under the eyelid in the space of a blink. Passing from one to the next yields a sense of something both inchoate and rhythmic.

Indeed, one can conceive of these images in terms of a calculus of finite differences, in which variation is seen as a succession of increments that are finite, rather than infinitesimally small. Or in terms of science fiction, with the unsuspecting viewer tripping inside a Piet Mondrian or a fun-house mirror, where scale is up for grabs and illusion prevails. LeWitt has planned for all possibilities.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through February. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Calculation and Abstraction: Sharon Ryan’s first solo show, now on view at Gallery LASCA, is equal parts flash and elegance. Racy doodles proliferate across the surface of unpainted birch panels and, from the looks of things, Ryan knows her way around metamorphoses: Lima beans hanging from threads become stray vaginas, eyeballs caught in tweezers morph into salmon pushing against the current, and hairy organisms alternately court paranoia and winks.

If you want to get technical, it’s a bit like feminist painter Sue Williams channeling ace Surrealist Andre Masson. But rather than Williams’ carnival-esque anger, Ryan maintains a vague amusement.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that she appropriates a style (what the Surrealists called “automatism”) that is supposed to be predicated upon spontaneity--itself a contradiction in terms. But appearances aside, there is nothing automatic about Ryan’s calculated images--unless you count the fact that subtexts (painterly or otherwise) are almost invariably sexual.

There are in-jokes aplenty here, and the one about the work’s pressing physicality is probably the best. The liquid brushwork is bruisingly sensual, and the way it responds to the grain of the panels upon which it is superimposed accents its excitability. Ryan has picked the ideal support: Unpainted birch has never looked so naked.

Also at Gallery LASCA, Merion Estes’ new abstractions are the painterly equivalent of courtly love: passionate and utterly unconcerned with real life. If Estes has made a career chasing after biological or botanical forms, the chase is up.

These agglomerating spirals and rapid-fire disks of fuchsia, pink, purple and gold are the stuff of fantasy--too freakish to be true to anything but the fancies of poets. The six large paintings trumpet the euphoria of color and concern themselves with little else.

When nature does appear--and it does, here and there, in the form of wandering cabbage roses--it is not to suggest romance or femininity. These flowers are memories of the real, being crowded out of the mind’s eye. They are bits of decoration, familiar places the eye can rest, away from the heat.

The eye also tends to linger over the dripped, scuffed, scumbled, stained and feathered backgrounds. These suggest that Estes is still committed to a certain kind of expressiveness, though it is clearly beginning to mitigate against itself. For ecstasy is predicated upon the falling away of the self--a prospect that makes perfect sense, as long as you’re standing in front of these dizzying works of art.

* Gallery LASCA, 3630 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 381-1525, through Dec. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Allegory and ‘Ritual’: Lezley Saar, daughter of well-known assemblage artist Betty Saar and sister of sculptor Allison Saar, collects, dismembers and then reassembles texts, antique photographs, bits of glass, rusted chains and other found objects to address questions of history, memory and spirituality.

However affecting, it’s easy to be put off by the work. There’s something palpably needy about its grand ambitions. Yet “Repetitive Ritual,” Saar’s current show at Jan Baum Gallery, fares better than usual, mostly because the artist struggles against letting her themes trample her delicate materials.

These works break down roughly into two types: old books that are literally hollowed out, then refilled with tiny narrative paintings and scavenged objects; or leather-bound book covers or yellowed pages nailed together to form “canvases” upon which images are painted.

Many are allegories disguised as portraits. “Artaud” features the tormented visage of the legendary figure, glimpsed behind a scrim of bullets. “The Silent Twins” makes reference to June and Jennifer Gibbons, sisters who spoke only to one another through their 20s; it meditates upon the split self, with the twins’ somber faces separated by a crooked circle of driftwood.

This latter work is haunting but unfocused. The precise relationship of the image to the patchwork of tattered book covers on which it is painted never becomes clear.

More successful are several smaller pieces in which Saar surrenders to the lure of ornament and juxtaposition. In “The Changelings,” a tiny painting of cocooned babies is framed by bits of blanched wood and pale netting. Stashed inside an emptied-out and heavily embossed white leather book, the piece is concentrated and morbid, a perfectly unexpected Surrealist object.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Dec. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.