Seeing Double in Beyt’s Monochrome Paintings

In her first solo show at L.A. Louver Gallery in 1992, Mary Beyt showed a series of lush but cool monochrome paintings that didn’t exactly adhere to the rules of their genre. By that, I refer to Color-field painting’s legendary “purity,” which Beyt tampered with by creating something distinctly other: all-over floral patterns, derived from bolts of manufactured lace.

While much was made at the time of Beyt and feminism, Beyt and handicraft, Beyt and decoration, the new monochromatic paintings at L.A. Louver suggest that the artist is less interested in what is by now a well-rehearsed brand of historical revisionism than in a certain kind of mind game.

Beyt doesn’t want to trick the viewer into thinking she sees something she doesn’t--or, worse yet, to enforce a game of peek-a-boo. Rather, she is interested in obsession, the compulsion to repeat and the uncanniness of the double.

One painting shows a double image of swans embedded in successive fields of tiny flowers. Another features a pastoral landscape where pairs of birds sweep by a trio of trees. A third includes horses frolicking in front of an idealized countryside, whose sky is pierced by not one but three church steeples.

What’s strange about all of these images (the first a deep blue, the second an acrid yellow, the third pale green) is that they feel like defective Rorschachs, broken records or jammed strips of film, the same frame repeated until things come to a dead stop.

The repetition of patterns is of course a structural element of lace, the template for all of these works. But Beyt brings out the perversity of decoration by varying the patterns just enough to thwart the sense of deja vu.

It is certainly a coincidence that the word “lace” derives from the Latin for “ensnare.” Then again, in the realm of memory and desire--Beyt’s realm--nothing is ever entirely accidental.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4966, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Like Young: The very least you can say about Tony Tasset is that he understands the principle of economy. There’s no waste at Christopher Grimes Gallery, just a nicely carved jack-o’-lantern sitting nonchalantly on the floor and, leaning against the wall, a larger-than-life-size Cibachrome of the artist, decked out as rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famer Neil Young.

Tasset has done this sort of thing before. In his last show at Grimes, he accoutered himself as another iconic figure, Robert Smithson, and managed to say quite a bit about masquerade, desire and the endless recycling of myth.

This time he wears a hyperbolic early 1970s get-up: long, unkempt hair tucked into a patriotic red, white and blue leather hat with beaded trim; a turquoise and silver choker; a Harley-Davidson T-shirt under a red-and-blue flannel lumberjack shirt; a fringed jacket; frayed Levi’s and well-worn cowboy boots. Strumming a Suzuki guitar with a peace sign and dove-embossed strap under artfully hot orange stage lights, Tasset-as-Young makes for a poignant, unendingly amusing picture of the pop star as vehicle for projection--something artists know quite a bit about.

As for the pumpkin, it may refer to Young’s album, “Harvest,” and the notion of Halloween dress-up and free goodies (the rocker’s famed perks). Or maybe not. That it is in fact not a mushy pumpkin but one cast in bronze goes to art’s promise of eternity. Perhaps more precisely, it alludes to the way in which stardom of all kinds hinges upon the transformation of ecstatic moments into marketable phenomena.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through June 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Tripping: In 1975, an unnamed Los Angeles artist assumed the persona of Madam X--explorer, soothsayer, philosopher, prophet, messenger, medium, “half being of the Eternal Culture, half human being” and--at least in retrospect, I think--dry wit.

At the Living Room, an installation entitled “The Reading Room of Madam X” gathers together some of the magazines, books, objects, paintings and newspapers created by Madam X over the past 20 years, covering what she refers to as her prehistory, early period, middle period, late period, post-late period and later period.

The best are the illustrated, black-and-white “GAZETs” Madam X sent out once a month to her heroes. These documents ruminate on her journeys to the timeless dimension (“the new era is timeless!”), her views on history (“nothing happened!!!”) and her take on American politics (“Congress Declares: 1/2 of World Unconstitutional”).

Displayed in a cartoonish kiosk, draped with red-and-white awnings, or a luscious blue box of the sort you might find on the corner if you lived in a Walt Disney film, these well-crafted bits of ephemera are surreal in the manner of David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, though hardly as sophisticated a conceptual exercise. Still, it’s a trip when you find yourself asking if this can possibly be for real--and discover that you really can’t be sure.

* The Living Room, 1132 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 451-2647, through June 7. Open Saturdays.

Heartfelt: In new paintings and mixed-media objects at Random Gallery, Val Echavarria creates black hearts, aching hearts, cheating hearts and bleeding hearts, exploiting the heart’s legendary richness as metaphor.

“Caged Heart” consists of a delicate, scrollwork cage containing a heart made of feathers, perched upon a swing. “Patient Heart” features a painting of a heart, studded with the hands of a clock.

“Heart of a Spiritual Predator” is somewhat more typical: a painting of a heart partially covered with plastic flies, more of which lie in a heap behind the image’s thick glass, and, like captions to a photograph, a series of laminated newspaper clippings about cult leaders David Koresh and Jim Jones.

Mixing up a variety of genres and idioms ranging from Mexican retablos to California assemblage art, Echavarria makes work that can be affecting but more often is plagued by excessive familiarity. This sense of having seen it before is exacerbated by the artist’s apparent lack of faith in her viewers: Her message hits home about four times per piece, which is at least three times too many.

Echavarria’s sense of purpose is duly noted and indeed admirable. But she might well heed the maxim that less is more.

BE THERE

Random Gallery, 6040 Figueroa St., Highland Park, (213) 550-8000, through June 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.