A Sense of the Familiar in Ruscha’s Landscapes

Edward Ruscha’s new paintings at Gagosian Gallery are like nothing else he has made, yet make perfect sense as soon as you see them. Entirely unexpected, yet still hauntingly familiar, these nearly monochromatic map fragments break new ground while seamlessly fitting into the artist’s sprawling oeuvre, which for the past 40 years has examined the intersection between words and pictures.

The big canvases and smaller works on paper that make up Ruscha’s first hometown solo show of paintings in nearly 10 years play the abstract space of language against the physical space of images, setting both adrift against the vast landscape of Los Angeles.

Eight of the 10 large paintings couldn’t be simpler. Each of these predominantly horizontal works consists of a dappled gray expanse through which lighter gray lines angle off into the distance or follow meandering paths across the picture plane. Labeled with the names of L.A. boulevards, avenues and streets, Ruscha’s stripped-down diagrams are unsentimental in their Minimalist specificity.

They are also keenly aware of the fact that when artists give viewers room to maneuver (along with a nudge in the right direction), we can’t help but fill up a picture’s empty spaces by projecting our desires onto it--using its mute blankness to trigger memories and associations.

As if they were stylish, streamlined Rorschach blots, Ruscha’s hands-off paintings function something like movie screens, where various participatory narratives unfold--according to your willingness to get involved. Unlike Rorschach blots, however, these neatly ruled paintings do not invite private, personalized responses. Decidedly public and aimed at the social space of the urban sprawl we all move through, Ruscha’s canvases insist that painting is a public event whose power resides in its capacity to mobilize viewers. As such, his abstract images function as fingerprints of the city.

His gray paintings appear to be made of particularly thick exhaust fumes, as if their surfaces have collected the residue of countless trips across town. To get this effect, Ruscha has manipulated a spray gun so that, instead of dispensing with an all-over, even mist of color, it sputters and spits, emitting airborne droplets that leave a lot of canvas visible.

The remaining two paintings stick out like sore thumbs against the diaphanous grayness that shrouds the rest of the show and recalls the atmospheric soup into which Los Angeles dissolves on smoggy days. In this pair of pictures, Ruscha uses vividly rendered mountainscapes with crystal-clear skies as the backdrops for two series of boldly printed L.A. street names that diminish in size as they recede into illusionistic deep space. Freely shifting between the scale of a wide-screen movie and an optometrist’s chart, these slippery paintings keep viewers off balance by planting one foot in the world of words and the other in that of images--and then turning both around.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, (310) 271-9400, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Colorful Impact: For all the deliberation and restraint that clearly goes into Penelope Krebs’ abstract paintings, it’s remarkable how intuitive and idiosyncratic they are. At Kiyo Higashi Gallery, five new oils on canvas deliver what viewers have come to expect from the Los Angeles-based painter: modestly scaled works in which a consistent and deceptively simple structure serves as the basis for dazzling orchestrations of color’s unpredictable impact.

Each of Krebs’ square canvases measures from 31 to 33 inches on a side, and consists of 13 vertical bands that are about 2 1/4 inches wide. These wildly colored segments include the screaming yellow of highlighter marking pens, the powdery red of sun-faded bricks and the palpable density of indigo blue. The palette is so keyed up that even its primary colors appear to be out of this world.

A consummate colorist, Krebs is even better when she lends her talents to the hair-splitting articulation of indescribably vivid secondaries and otherwise unimaginable tertiaries. Crisp sea-foam green inhabits the same panel as sizzling olive green. Fiery orange-red sometimes blazes brightly and at other times seems to be as cool as apricot sorbet. Strangely flat aquas absorb light as if it were water and they were industrial-strength sponges. And a wide range of pinks slips from fleshy salmon to hot bubble gum and juicy watermelon, sometimes spilling over into mutant lavenders and perverse burgundies.

There is nothing pure or high-handed about Krebs’ shamelessly stimulating colors. Singularly, they’re sexy. In 13-part compositions, their pulse is amplified, resulting in paintings at once strait-laced and outrageous.

The biggest difference between Krebs’ new abstractions and a similar body of work she exhibited three years ago is that each of her recent canvases is about 25% larger and includes two additional bands. Gone are the thin black dividing lines; instead of deploying the orderly austerity of black to demarcate her eye-popping stripes, Krebs plays up their fluidity by inserting razor-thin lines of equally strange color between each panel’s bands.

Consequently, you no longer feel as if you’re looking through vertical window panes (or bars) at an inaccessible world of unbelievable brilliance. Both softer and more intense, Krebs’ new paintings inhabit the same space that you do.

The only thing that differentiates them from everyday reality is the intensity of their colors, which make the rest of the world look dull--as if it’s a grainy black-and-white video that’s been copied too many times. Krebs’ art represents one of those rare occasions when abstraction actually takes viewers closer to reality’s fullness rather than removing us from its splendor.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-2482, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Screen Presence: Gregory Crewdson’s large color photographs mimic movies. Elaborately staged and theatrically lit, all of the New York-based photographer’s sharply focused C-prints are so suffused with production value that they have the presence of enlarged film stills from imaginary dramas.

The nine scenes presented at Marc Foxx Gallery mix melodramatic setups with macabre flourishes and tongue-in-cheek humor. Readily accessible, these pictures fall into two categories: long-range shots that include surrounding landscapes and tightly focused close-ups set in domestic interiors or suburban backyards.

In one of the former, a cow lies on its side as firemen, paramedics and government inspectors begin their investigations amid shell-shocked neighbors. Wearing bright yellow slickers, most of these looky-loos stand stiffly at the edges of their respective properties. It’s hard to tell if they’re oversize lawn ornaments or members of a militia made up of zombies with day jobs.

Supernatural forces--a la “The X-Files”--manifest themselves in Crewdson’s highly suggestive images. In a night scene, a solitary party-goer is caught like a deer in the headlights of a beam shining from the sky. Another shows a septic tank attendant approaching a “Port-a-Potty” from which emanates ominously glowing smoke.

For their part, Crewdson’s close-ups exploit the tacky theatrics of horror movies and the slick sheen of large-format photography. In one, a woman’s white-eyed corpse lies in an overgrown field full of four-legged creatures. In another, a similarly posed girl lies on the floor as if unconscious, while a boy holds his hand over her exposed abdomen, as if in a trance. A third depicts a leering woman flying like a witch over a garbage-strewn patio, and a fourth shows a sleep-walker making a mess of her negligee by sitting in a pile of rich soil that has somehow made its way into her dining room.

Although Crewdson’s photographs eagerly refer to the styles and techniques of cinematic productions, they actually have the presence of trailers, especially those that get you to go to the movie only to realize that the preview included all the good scenes. This is probably due to the fact that his over-produced pictures so self-consciously combine elements found in Jeff Wall’s staged scenes and Cindy Sherman’s flagrantly fake snapshots that they leave too little room for Crewdson to do much original work.

* Marc Foxx Fine Art, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Check the Air Pressure: Four years ago, Carlos Mollura burst onto the art scene by inflating a giant vinyl bubble that filled an entire gallery, bulging out its door, pressing against its walls and swelling around its rafters. Since then, the Argentina-born, L.A.-based sculptor has exhibited numerous free-standing and wall-mounted works that have recalled his debut but have never quite measured up to its promise.

A single piece at ACME Gallery changes all this. As smart and as playful as the artist’s first overblown balloon, his new sculpture is more engaging and less passive-aggressive. It tempts you to call it subtle, but that adjective seems to be a bit too pretentious and artsy for a work that resembles nothing so much as an enormous air mattress that has somehow become stuck in the middle of the gallery.

Although we usually think of a room’s middle as the space that’s roughly equidistant from its walls, Mollura upends this expectation by taking the ceiling and floor into account. Tightly pressed against all four walls, his fully inflated air bag is suspended just overhead, like a synthetic bank of clouds. If the gallery were divided into three similarly sized layers, his untitled sculpture would occupy the middle one.

Consequently, viewers are allowed to move freely around the empty floor, experiencing from many perspectives the way light bounces around the interior of Mollura’s sculpture and reflects off its taut yet flexible surfaces. Made of 10 rectangular sections that run lengthwise, his mammoth expanse of clear, opaque and blue polyurethane acts as a horizontal buffer zone between the spaces above and below it, muffling sound and creating the impression of atmospheric compression.

Paradoxically, you don’t feel cramped or claustrophobic beneath Mollura’s dysfunctional mobile. Rather than drifting through the air, his industrial-scale piece of inflatable furniture is strangely expansive in its fusion of Light and Space intangibility and Warholian nonchalance. Even when art goes over your head, it still sometimes hits you in the gut.

* ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.