Works Combining Beauty With Brains

A small two-person show by Las Vegas-based painters Jack Hallberg and Yek reveals how many viewers treat contemporary art in the same way sexists treat women. If a painting or sculpture is drop-dead beautiful, people often assume it’s neither smart nor serious, but some kind of bimbo whose good looks are accompanied by cluelessness.

While the feminist movement changed the world by showing us that beauty and intelligence are in no way opposed, the art world has become something of a refuge for curmudgeons who can’t quite accept this fact. Strange as it may seem, contemporary art can be too beautiful for its own good.

At Post Gallery, Hallberg and Yek mock this conservative idea by presenting paintings that are as ravishing as they are rigorous. Titled “Goofy and Off-Center,” their fun-loving show begins by pretending to be little more than a pleasant diversion from everyday drudgery and art-world solemnity.

Bright colors and playful shapes greet visitors to the dimly lit gallery, which is animated by a sense of strange weightlessness. The backgrounds of Hallberg’s square panels are painted an extremely dull gray, which seems to suck the light right out of the room. Consequently, the 3-D dots that populate his otherwise flat images look as if they’re suspended in midair, like cartoon versions of enlarged microorganisms that have taken on a life of their own.

For their part, Yek’s four curved panels appear to glow from within--like cybernetic sunsets or designer drinks served by a bartender who favors cool refreshments with unnaturally enhanced hues. In front of these dazzling expanses of impure color, razor-sharp lines bounce around, guiding your eyeballs off into infinity.

Aside from entertaining viewers with optical razzle-dazzle, both artists’ paintings present thoughtful meditations on spatial ambiguity. Although these works might be dismissed for merely revisiting 1960s psychedelia, they are equally indebted to the Light and Space Movement, whose trippy installations from that era also turned apparent emptiness into mind-blowing experiences of visual resplendence.

Hallberg and Yek raise the stakes of their argument against ugliness by bathing their paintings in a sexy mixture of ordinary illumination and fluorescent black light. If brains and beauty can go hand in hand, why can’t tacky glamour and abstract painting be two sides of the same coin?

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 622-8580, through Aug. 29. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Animated: No matter how violent classic Saturday morning cartoons ever got, their characters always bounced back. Elmer Fudd regularly survived shotgun blasts, Wile E. Coyote emerged unscathed from falls into deep canyons, and Tom and Jerry quickly rebounded from all sorts of household accidents.

Although nothing so drastic happens in any of Anthony Ausgang’s cartoon-inspired paintings at Merry Karnowsky Gallery, it’s clear that his anthropomorphic felines do not lead charmed lives. It is as if the artist’s generic cats were the unlucky second cousins of Hanna-Barbera’s big, happy family of indestructible animals. Ausgang’s colorful acrylics on canvas depict a world in which things go wrong--and stay that way. His superficially playful pictures are as deeply indebted to an artistic tradition of Realism as they are to the giddy escapism of cartoons.

Three bodies of work make up this ruthless show. The first consists of anonymous thrift-store paintings to which Ausgang has added an ill-mannered intruder who disrupts whatever was taking place in the original painting. Aside from an image of Van Gogh as a graffiti artist zipping through Holland’s canals on a personal watercraft, Ausgang’s altered images are one-liners that wear thin rather quickly.

His own paintings fare better because they articulate more complex narratives about the mean-spirited side of modern life. Bombs are dropped into rabbit holes or delivered to terrified residents, as party-goers in black hoods strike a pin~ata shaped like a blowup doll.

Ausgang’s best works are his tondos, in which the distortion of convex surveillance mirrors provides an ideal format for more animated compositions. Each of these compact images consists of a close-up of a character shadowed by his silhouette, creating a jittery visual experience that recalls a movie seen via a shaky, out-of-whack projector. True to Ausgang’s theme of life run amok, the form of his round paintings matches their content.

* Merry Karnowsky Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-4408, through Aug. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.