Mean Streets : Paintings in vibrant colors depict foreboding urban scenery of L.A.

The City of Angels, as painted by Carlos Vargas, is a many-splendored, rainbow-colored and danger-filled place, beautiful and deadly. The young artist presents a fascinating show of paintings at the Burbank Creative Arts Center, with vibrant works that literally burst with color and a fragile sense of festivity.

Vargas, born in Mexico and now based in downtown L.A., brings the natural vivacity of folk art into a more contemporary context, and it’s not always a happy picture. In his work, stylized visions depict urbanscapes as fantasy land.

His palette is garish, sometimes suggesting a neo-fauvist degree of exaggeration. But there is urban angst bubbling up in these paintings, too. A recurring motif in the exhibition is the conical beam of light emanating from street lamps and, more strikingly, from police helicopters hunting evil on the streets.

Orderly platoons of dark rain clouds, symbols of nourishment and foreboding, vie for airspace with the surveillance choppers, a persistent reminder of trouble brewing below. Elsewhere, Vargas depicts natural calamities, in and out of the city, tying in with the new wave of natural disaster films. A tornado strikes a skyscraper in one; a volcano spews its beautiful terror in another image of life’s inherent volatility.

Generally, these are pretty images lined with dread. It’s a dance along the edge of the abyss.

* Carlos Vargas, “El Nino Paintings,” through Aug. 27 at Creative Art Center Gallery, 1100 W. Clark Ave., Burbank. Hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday; (818) 238-5397.

Art and Letters: At the Brand Library is a show by the Society of Calligraphers, and, to coin a shameless pun, the writing is on the wall. These patient practitioners of an age-old art form often find worthy and noble texts upon which to lavish time, energy and craft.

Biblical passages, bumper sticker adages or other materials are fair game, but the letters themselves are the thing. Some works employ extreme or unorthodox measures, like Lefty Fontenrose’s twirling celebrations of palindromes, or Randall Hasson’s “Repentant,” a huge piece, scrolling from ceiling to floor.

For kitsch’s sake, Joan Hawks writes out Elton John’s ode to Di, “England’s Rose,” suitable for framing. On higher cultural ground, Barbara Esum’s “Paul Klee” places Klee quotations (i.e. “A line is a dot going for a walk”) on an abstract background. Arline Saul’s “Art Begins Where Geometry Ends” involves a smear of overlapping letters, canceling out linguistic meaning.

Geri Bieber’s “Ketubah-Jewish Marriage Contract” fits words within the shape of a synagogue, touching on the natural calligraphic impulse within Hebraic tradition.

There’s something beguiling about this medium, in the word-processing age when handwritten texts are becoming less common. The result is a widespread uglification of handwriting. This refined work flies in the face of the trend, reason enough to take a gander at the exhibition.

* Society of Calligraphy show, through Aug. 29 at Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Hours: 1-9 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday; 1-6 p.m. Wednesday; 1-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday; (818) 548-2051.