From Mysteries of Wonderland to the Realities of a Modern Life

If you’ve ever had to sit through a lecture you weren’t really interested in--and that covered material on which you would not be tested--you’ll have an idea of what it’s like to visit Diana Thater’s video installation at Patrick Painter Inc. Think of Thater as a pedagogue who does not want to wow her audience with a dazzling delivery of her argument, but prefers to make her points obliquely. Only then does the initial stinginess of her work give way to a type of guarded openness that has a long way to go before anyone mistakes it for generosity.

Although the L.A.-based artist’s piece of electronic theater mimics the format of much early 1970s structuralist film, and baldly illustrates theorist Gilles Deleuze’s argument in “The Logic of Sense,” it is not entirely academic. Thater goes out of her way to give viewers plenty of room to daydream. Titled “The Caucus Race,” after a section of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” her six-part work sets up an open-ended situation whose chief purpose is to allow your mind to roam freely, occasionally circling back to the installation’s various images before drifting off again.

Thater’s work consists of four monitors set on the darkened gallery’s floor and two videodisc projectors aimed at adjoining walls. All six devices operate sequentially, with only one showing an image at a time. Consequently, there is no beginning, middle or end to the circular arrangement, which repeats itself in perpetuity.

Projected onto a wall, the longest component is made up of single words spelled out in colorful Toys R Us lettering. Every few seconds, one word disappears before another takes its place, taking readers through Carroll’s popular tale at a plodding, robotic pace that couldn’t share less with the story’s shifting rhythms or the way it sounds when it’s read aloud.

When this narrative fragment ends, the first three monitors present brief clips of exotic animals in captivity, including giraffes and llamas, an orangutan, and a pair of hippopotamuses frolicking underwater. The fourth TV shows a snippet of bright light shining through leafy trees. Returning to the wall, the next image is a bird’s-eye view of a trained dolphin leaping high out of a pool and splashing back into the water.

As a whole, Thater’s modestly high-tech installation makes fairly rudimentary points about the different ways people make sense of the world. (A related installation at the MAK Center in West Hollywood makes a similar argument, if even less clearly.) Slowing our perceptual machinery down, Thater’s work invites viewers to look at each word as an abstract composition, in the manner of a monochrome painting or a piece of modular Minimalism.

Alternatively, these visual elements can be read as a text, in which interrelated elements count above all else. For their part, the animals hint at the seriousness and spuriousness of speech, suggesting that physical sensations and written languages are not the same thing.

Most art begins with this wisdom. Unfortunately, Thater’s ends there, preventing it from being much more than an illustrative exercise that treads well-worn paths without breaking new ground.

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Every Face Tells a Story: On one level, John Sonsini’s new paintings at Dan Bernier Gallery are very simple. Each depicts the same young man striking an ordinary pose in an unremarkable domestic setting.

On another level, however, these straightforward portraits are extremely complex. The longer you look into the eyes of their slightly larger than life-size sitter, the more you see. Well after you think you’ve gleaned all the information Sonsini has laid out across his lovingly worked canvases, more details and insights keep bubbling to the surface.

Titled “Gabriel,” for the model Sonsini has been painting for about 40 hours a week for the past two years, this series depicts a dark-haired man whose plain, working-class handsomeness has not yet hardened into me-against-the-world toughness. Fresh, vulnerable and searching, while hardly naive or inexperienced, the Gabriel whom Sonsini paints has the presence of someone whose looks would not stop you in the street, but whose thoughtful conversation would probably make you want to know him better.

There’s nothing formulaic or labored about any of the eight paintings displayed. The five close-ups, showing Gabriel’s head and shoulders, embody the casual accuracy of precise observation and the supple confidence of being able to convey the singular contours of a human face via the juicy, skin-like surface of an oil painting.

The three full-length portraits amplify the lean physicality of the smaller works, evoking the weighty solidity of chiseled sculptures. If you think that TV and magazines have hollowed out our ability to experience presence, go stand before one of these paintings and see if it doesn’t hit you in the solar plexus with a sensation both vivid and moving.

After a while, it’s unclear whether Sonsini’s fascinating paintings are exposing their sitter to viewers--or, you to him. What is clear is that the artist, in wholly devoting himself to his craft, has painted himself out of the picture.

Although much portraiture invites viewers to fantasize about the relationship between the artist (usually male) and his model (usually female), Sonsini downplays such behind-the-scenes intrigue. His bold images suggest that such speculation is a defense mechanism viewers commonly use to keep themselves out of the picture. That it doesn’t work here gives these highly sophisticated paintings a primal energy.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 936-1021, through Tuesday. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Stick Figures: A strong strand of adolescent defiance has always run through Richard Prince’s appropriated images and large-scale jokes. At Regen Projects, a suite of new paintings shows that the New York-based artist has expanded his repertoire to include color-coordinated canvases. Elaborate in comparison to his intentionally thin earlier works, these multilayered images strike such a childish pose of bad-boy rebelliousness that they come off looking cute--in an entirely opportunistic manner.

The little stick figures that animate Prince’s approximately 6-foot-square paintings are silk-screened from an 8-year-old boy’s drawings of people shooting oversize pistols, victims with their hands in the air and others lying on the ground. Cats, dogs, cars and houses also make an appearance, but not nearly as often as guns, from whose barrels explode zigzagged emblems of ever-present violence.

Printed in black-and-white, these simple scrawlings are set against backdrops that have the density and smudginess of overused schoolroom blackboards. Ghostly traces and smeared halos of over-painted (or erased) figures lurk in the shadows.

The main difference between Prince’s paintings and blackboards is that his include cloudy smears of bright, acrylic color. Applied thinly and dryly so that it looks more like smudged chalk than brushed paint, the colors in each of these works follow holiday conventions: a predominantly black and orange picture recalls Halloween; the bruised pinks of another suggest a black-and-blue valentine; and the dirty pastels of a third look as if they were made for a melancholic Easter.

At the bottom of each painting is a blank space where Prince has swiftly written a mean-spirited joke, as if to provide a caption for the image above. More to the point, these dumb one-liners symbolize his attempt to write his way into a style of painting that is nothing more than an uninspired fusion of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Sue Williams, to which Prince adds very little.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Toeing the Line: At Art Center College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #886” doesn’t repay the time (or the trouble) it takes to go see it. The problem with this work is that it is neither sufficiently rigorous in its conceptualization nor sufficiently decorative in its execution to either sustain cogent thought or to be stimulating in an evocative sense--much less do both simultaneously.

Blandness permeates the nicely proportioned gallery. This is doubly disappointing since its distinctive architecture allows viewers to see both sides of its exterior walls, set as they are within a larger rectangle of glass walls.

LeWitt has instructed a team of assistants to paint a meandering black line (about 20 inches wide) around the exteriors of the white walls. Circuitously weaving from floor to ceiling, this glossy stripe mimics the path of a mountain road filled with switchbacks, or a river in canyon country.

Intentionally Minimal, however, the bare-bones drawing quickly sheds such poetic associations. In the end, it resembles nothing so much as an attempt to fill up an empty area with as little drama and incident as possible.

Inside the gallery, approximately six similar lines follow less extreme contours, smoothly segueing into one another like freeway entrances and exits. Like the line surrounding the outside of the gallery, these loosely interwoven threads follow no overarching pattern or determining logic. Their meandering patterns appear to be random.

It’s strange that LeWitt’s brand of Conceptualism, which began nearly 30 years ago by explicitly attacking art’s decorative underpinnings, now looks so much like publicly scaled interior decoration. Because times have changed and decoration is no longer a dirty word in art circles, his wall drawing has the presence of a leftover from an earlier era, when the lines between avant-garde art and decorative embellishments were more clearly drawn.

* Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (626) 396-2244. Ends Jan. 17. Closed Mondays.