A Smart, Animated Mix of High, Low Style

If any of Dr. Seuss’ cartoon characters collected art, Sally Elesby’s abstract paintings could easily be the centerpieces of their collections. Quick-witted, fun-loving, unpretentious and intelligent, the L.A.-based artist’s subtly wacky works at Gallery LASCA embody the same undercurrent of subversiveness that tugs at Seuss’ potent tales about the imagination’s place in everyday life.

Plus, Elesby’s agile constructions operate like the pictures in Seuss’ storybooks. While you don’t have to have much of a fantasy life to imagine the good doctor’s cartoons springing to life when you’re not looking at them, it’s no more difficult to picture Elesby’s quirky paintings darting around the gallery and getting into all kinds of mischief the minute you take your eyes off them.

Each spindly, 3-D piece consists of a warped and wavy grid, loosely woven from various lengths of ordinary wire. Some of the wires’ ends have been burrowed into tiny holes in the wall. Others have been bent to form sweeping curves that often extend more than a foot from the wall.

Over these lightweight, gravity-defying armatures, Elesby has applied many coats of common glue that has been tinted with a variety of pigments and painted in a rainbow of eye-popping colors. Each glue-covered strand of wire recalls a string that has been dipped in hot wax to form a slender candle, except that in Elesby’s hands the gracefulness of well-made candles is replaced with the goofiness of cartoons.

Individual drips and icicle-like dribbles, among other wonderful imperfections, give her art a sensual energy all its own. Some rectangles are completely filled in with glue, causing the wires to do double duty, both as a miniature painting’s frail stretcher bars and as its absent canvas.

Many of Elesby’s funny, undulating works appear to crawl across the walls like spiders. Some mimic insects, probing the air with elaborate antennae. Others resemble little octopi, reaching their tenuous tentacles toward viewers. And one has the presence of an amorous pterodactyl, who’s advertising its attractions by spreading its pastel green wings across the wall.

All of Elesby’s animated abstractions have irregular surfaces that range in texture from fuzzy to smooth, bumpy to sleek. Several of the larger works (reaching nearly 4 feet on a side) seem less like cartoon characters and more like the lively landscapes in which these fictitious beings romp, revel and cavort, gleefully celebrating their freedom from the laws of gravity, the strictures of society and the drudgery of common sense.

With an extreme economy of means, Elesby’s playful pieces align these freedoms--the same ones that drove early 20th century abstraction--with the facts of animated cartoons. Having one foot firmly planted in high art and one in low-brow illustration, her supple constructions deliver the best of both worlds.

Along with Daniel Wiener’s whimsical sculptures, Michael Pierzynski’s tiny tableaux and Monique Prieto’s loopy paintings, Elesby’s wall-works suggest that some kind of movement fusing conventional abstraction and cartoon animation is afoot and kicking up its heels.

* Gallery LASCA, 3630 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 381-1525, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Charged Symbols: Ornamentation isn’t what it used to be, especially in Philip Taaffe’s first solo show in Los Angeles. At Gagosian Gallery, the New York-based painter’s multilayered works turn one of Modern art’s most entrenched prohibitions--against decoration--on its ear. Decorative excess may be dangerous, these paintings seem to say, but that’s precisely where art’s pleasures and powers reside.

The visual force of sinuous lines, slithering contours and elaborate patterns takes the shape of big snakes in Taaffe’s canvases. Dozens of monocled cobras and hundreds of California king snakes, in both their ringed and striped phases, form all-over compositions that writhe with optical energy.

Printed with two photo-silkscreens that depict a single snake and its mirror image, these potent paintings give viewers something like double vision. It’s very difficult to see the whole tightly woven pattern formed by the entangled snakes’ bodies and to simultaneously recognize these curving lines as snakes, poisonous or not.

A visual tug-of-war ensues as you begin flipping back and forth between seeing abstract orchestrations of formal elements, or representations of legless reptiles that are potentially threatening. No matter which perspective momentarily predominates, your memory of the other view continues to haunt you. Both menacing and beautiful, these paintings put some bite back into abstraction.

The snakes’ shapes echo in Taaffe’s other images, particularly in the show’s largest canvas. Depicting characters lifted from the Sinhalese alphabet and a grid of stylized leaves set against a black ground, this starkly sumptuous image similarly reads as an abstract pattern and as a series of representational fragments that may spell out a message, but only if you know the code.

By embedding charged symbols in supposedly meaningless ornamentation, all of Taaffe’s paintings insist that trying to purge decoration from art is as wrongheaded as it is impossible. What often gets dismissed as frivolous and silly turns out to be central to painting’s ambitions.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Mementos: A fine selection of 10 sculptures and 20 drawings by Eduardo Chillida inaugurates Tasende Gallery’s new Los Angeles showroom. Down the street and around the corner at Remba Gallery, a thorough survey of recent prints by the 73-year-old Basque artist likewise outlines his career-long attempt to use abstract sculpture as a monument that not only marks the intersection of various worlds, but also causes them to momentarily come together.

Chillida’s strongest works bring the conceptual realm of abstract geometry into contact with the physical world of bodily experience, locating both in a social space that is firmly rooted in the natural environment. His large outdoor sculptures do this best.

Difficult to see from one perspective, these steel, concrete or brick structures require ambulatory viewing. Drawing people around and through their arches, overhangs and semi-enclosed areas, Chillida’s architectural sculptures are modeled on town squares and marketplaces. The negative spaces they embrace give viewers room to contemplate the myriad forces that collide and dovetail whenever people cooperate and compete in public endeavors like survival and civilization.

Simply because of their modest size, the steel, granite and fired-clay works at Tasende Gallery are less impressive than Chillida’s outdoor sculptures. Like the 27 mostly black-and-white aquatint etchings and silkscreened reliefs (along with a single woodcut and a lithograph) at Remba Gallery, his more privately oriented pieces appeal to the idea of public exchanges, instead of embodying their physical feel.

As a result, the sculptures, drawings and prints in this pair of exhibitions have the presence of souvenirs: poignant mementos of ambitious projects that require public engagement to generate their meanings.

* Tasende Gallery, 8808 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-8686; and Remba Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-1101, both through May 31.