Some New Adventures in the Color Red

In the absence of a better word--one less freighted perhaps--one could, and probably should, call Kiki Smith’s new work at Shoshana Wayne Gallery sublime. Here, a semicircle of blood drops made of crimson glass are poised like weapons, their pointed ends pricking at the air. Elsewhere, large sheets of nepal paper, hand-painted by Smith in various shades from magenta to tomato to dried blood, are patched together and ornamented with images in fine white ink of the moon, deer and owls.

Moody but not foreboding, ethereal but theatrical, this work alludes to the fragility of nature and the voraciousness of culture. But Smith is concerned neither to cast blame nor expiate sin. She is clearly otherwise engaged, plumbing the metaphoric depths of the color red and lingering over her exquisite surfaces.

Smith renders things--the pockmarked texture of the moon, the resplendent feathers of a peacock, the short, dense fur of a deer--so that they resemble stranger things still: chicken scratches, nervous twitches, tangles of hair, filmy cobwebs, Venetian lace. The eye, while registering the forms Smith depicts, gets lost in the intricate patterns, tracing and re-tracing circuitous routes designed to lead everywhere and nowhere. Like Gustave Moreau’s incessant embellishment, Smith’s hyper-detailed, even mannered drawing poses the question of the role of the decorative in epic painting--and without exactly answering it, suggests that the two are not incompatible.

Indeed, it’s difficult to swing back and forth between operatic vehemence (flayed skin and entrails) and gossamer lightness (parchment and butterflies), but Smith has always been good at it. Yet with its heroic scale, noble beast thematics and visual melodrama, this work would seem to surrender something--the edginess, perhaps--that has become Smith’s stock in trade. But it delivers something more than the sum of its parts. All else aside, it delivers the experience of beauty--something unexpected, flawed, yet fine.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-1, (310) 453-7535, through April 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Intimacy and Terror: At Bunny Yeager LA, Lutz Bacher sucks you in, trips you up and then sends you reeling--or at least pointing in a direction other than the one you thought you were heading.

This dynamic is characteristic of Bacher’s forays into installation, painting, sculpture and especially video. Her last show in L.A. featured the epic video “Do You Love Me?,” in which a collection of Bacher’s friends, colleagues and family talked about her for 12 hours. The piece masqueraded as a narcissistic indulgence, though it revealed nothing except Bacher’s desire to subject others to her intense scrutiny.

Here Bacher shows two videos, both on 160-minute loops, which share a characteristic perversity though they are apparently different. “Blue Moon” seems at first to be a poetic meditation, a halo of light against a dark sky, with a blue moon slowly emerging from behind it, as if recorded via time-lapse photography. Suddenly, however, one hears footsteps on the soundtrack, the whoosh of water in the sink and the tones of a phone. The “moon” starts shaking, and then jerking back and forth, revealing the whole cosmic setup to be a rather primitive mechanical artifice.

“A Normal Life: Bill and Laurie” is broken into two halves. In the first, Bill sits in a chair or by his computer, first in color and then close-up in black and white, telling the story of his life in all its American Gothic splendor: a con-man dad, a Belgian war-bride mom, a .38-toting brother, box lunches at Soledad Prison, heroin deliveries by bicycle, etc. In the second half, Laurie records a family birthday party with her new camcorder, lingering over the dog, the grandma, the clown paintings in the hallway, the sliding glass doors leading out to the pool and so on.

Though we never see Laurie, we learn about her from the things we hear her say and the way she operates the camera. Bill is the only one we see in his segment, but however confessional his monologue appears, he remains distant, in part because of Bacher’s incessant cutting, which implies deletions or absences to which we will never be made privy. What this adds up to, more or less, is another grand provocation--this time about intimacy, and the myriad terrors of expectations.

* Bunny Yeager LA, 839 S. Curson Ave., (213) 939-3217, through April 5. Open Saturdays.

Fantasy Times Two: “Myth and Fantasy,” a two-person show at Couturier Gallery, is alternately turgid and garish--but strangely not without appeal.

Lining the walls are Michael Madzo’s collage paintings, which consist of bits and pieces of pilfered high art imagery (heads on platters, bishops’ robes, rotting fruits and flowers, tiny Vermeer faces), stitched together with more ingenuity than wit. Perched high on pedestals are Jorge Marin’s ceramic sculptures of plump gods in bird masks or buxom wenches carrying platters of eggs, their tiny feet poised inexplicably on bloated globes.

Though Madzo, who shows regularly in Los Angeles, and Marin, a Mexican artist making his L.A. debut, ostensibly have little in common, they do share an obsession with fine craftsmanship, fantastic scenarios and mythologized histories. If Marin indulges in ribald humor (thus the profusion of eggs, parrots and fish, all of which, in Spanish slang, refer to genitalia), Madzo goes in for decidedly grandiloquent perversity, a contradiction in terms that goes a long way toward explaining why this work feels so much at odds with itself.

However, if you are willing to take the show as camp by default, if not exactly intention, you will discover quite a feast for the eyes: Check out especially Marin’s winged milkmaid, sporting a jester’s hat and a miniature parasol; and Madzo’s one-footed, cherubic party animal, a lampshade poised insouciantly on his head.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-5557, through April 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

On the Slate: If Frank Stella’s career had progressed backward toward purity rather than bombast, he might have produced something like Christopher Lane’s paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery--and saved us all some embarrassment.

Small and square, presented singly, in pairs, trios or quartets, Lane’s paintings are initially surprising because they aren’t exactly paintings. They are pieces of slate the artist incises with a tiny tool, creating the effect of fine white lines on black.

Sometimes, the lines are densely packed horizontals; sometimes they form grids; occasionally they are amplified by dashes of red gouache, as fine as capillaries, or bits of gold leaf, stuttering across the surface.

Each piece of slate is chosen for a particular flaw: a crevasse, a roughened texture, a sparkling bit of mica breaking the surface. These imperfections resist the perfect geometries that Lane imposes upon them, and so, too, do these works resist the very references they conjure: bar codes, empty parking lots, cybernetic structures, etc. However suggestive, these references are far too topical for work that struggles toward a timeless blankness.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through April 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.