Enjoying Simple Pleasures of Viewer Accessibility

Karen Carson’s spunky exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery is two shows in one. Combining sharp, formal rigor with savvy street-smarts, her spirited works from the last two years deliver everyday pleasures to everyday visitors. Although such indiscriminate generosity may sound perfectly sensible, it flies in the face of those viewers who insist that contemporary art is intrinsically difficult and that experts (like them) must interpret its deep, hidden meanings for the rest of us.

Carson’s four large panels in the main gallery make a mockery of the idea that art is an unfathomable sacrament that requires the intercession of specialists.

Made of symmetrical arrays of brightly colored arrows pointing up, down and across, these energized signs from 1997 do not spell out arcane messages. Instead, they take your eyes on crisscrossing jaunts that are regularly interrupted by narrow mirrors embedded in their crisply painted surfaces.

The physical activity of perusing a picture is the subject of these handcrafted abstractions. To look at Carson’s vibrant diagrams is to see--and experience--what transpires whenever we scan, study or scrutinize an image. You don’t have to know that their structures are based on the compositions of Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to get bodily involved with their pulsating choreography.

In the darkened back gallery, eight smaller works from 1998 transform the illuminated beer advertisements common to neighborhood bars into snappy graphic designs and shimmering landscapes. Reminiscent of simple woodcuts and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop prints, Carson’s accessible pictures of mountains, sunsets, forests and rivers also make fun of light-box photography, a genre favored by international museums.

Returning the over-produced theatrics of these chilly, white-walled institutions to their roots in comfortable hangouts where people actually socialize, Carson’s lowbrow signage invites viewers into a world of humble, mundane pleasures that are hard to beat wherever you find them.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Painterly: Although there’s not a drop of paint or a brush stroke in any of Carol Kaufman’s new works at Kiyo Higashi Gallery, viewers are left with no choice but to call these intriguing pieces paintings. Gorgeous, supple and suffused with colors at once atmospheric and palpable, the artist’s rectangular panels merit this label because they draw your eyes across sensuous surfaces and set your mind to thinking about the logic underlying their simple structures.

Initially, Kaufman’s exquisite diptychs (accompanied by a stunning triptych and a mesmerizing pair of single-panel paintings) appear to be thin sheets of metal that have been incised with fine lines and hung perfectly flush with the walls. Their metallic palette confirms this impression. Alternatively reflective and dull, their colors consist of a subtle range of muted silvers that recall nickel alloys of various ages and purity, as well as rich bronzes, coppers and golds.

The crisp, symmetrical edges of these precisely calibrated works buttress your belief that you’re looking at industrial-strength materials. Yet the surfaces of Kaufman’s taut panels exude a softness and warmth that are uncharacteristic of metal--and common to finely woven cloth or stretched canvas.

To come in for a close-up view is to see that these works are made of nothing more precious than Masonite panels, some of which Kaufman (who is an art director for The Times) has covered with a powdery coat of white, ocher or rusty red. Applied with colored pencils, these thin, tinted layers accentuate the imperfections in the seemingly smooth Masonite, and they serve as semitranslucent bases for the myriad horizontal lines she has drawn over all her works.

Ranging from razor-thin bands to fuzzy, yarn-like strands, the parallel lines set up a variety of rhythms that are abuzz with visual energy. Some surfaces are covered with so many lines that trying to determine where one ends and another begins is as difficult as dissecting the screen of a high-density television.

In terms of materials and techniques, Kaufman’s works are drawings. But they perform like the best abstract paintings, opening mysterious spaces across surfaces that caress your eyes and stimulate your mind.

Traditionally, drawing was the meat and potatoes of art. Unlike painting, which was based in the ethereal delectation of slippery, often unnameable colors, drawing defined boundaries, conveyed rational order and kept things clear (in black-and-white, as it were). It’s a measure of Kaufman’s achievement that she turns such conventions inside-out, transforming drawing into an art of remarkable spatial fluidity--that is to say, into painting.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pint-Size Power: Despite measuring only 15 by 12 inches, the largest paintings in Leslie Wayne’s first solo show in Los Angeles have the presence of much bigger works. Though size may matter for movie monsters (and their advertising campaigns), what counts for a painting is scale: the relationship between its actual dimensions and your bodily experience of its physical impact.

Wayne’s abstract panels compress the inconceivable power of massive geological processes into pint-size demonstrations of raw forcefulness. In the sunlit second-floor showroom of L.A. Louver Gallery, 21 new paintings resemble three-dimensional models of the Earth’s ever-changing crust.

Hardly a painter of serene landscapes, Wayne focuses on geological hot spots and the ensuing organic traumas that occur when the vast plates that make up the Earth’s surface collide, slide alongside or buckle under one another. One group of paintings outlines the shapes of a variety of mountain ranges that seem to have been pushed up when two immovable forces met.

Another group appears to depict active fault lines, along which all sorts of Earth-shattering activity takes place as gaps open, protuberances thrust upward and once-smooth expanses crumple like flattened tin cans. Landslides, tidal waves and volcanic eruptions occur frequently in Wayne’s dramatic paintings, which often suggest that they--and the Earth they stand in for--have been run through trash compactors or paper shredders.

One of the best things about these gritty works is that they don’t seem to depict events that have ended; they look as if the violent processes they record continue into the present. You can’t help but feel that if you watched very closely, you’d see an encrusted surface decompose even further. Their queasy, postindustrial palettes add to this impression, evoking noxious chemical meltdowns and strange transformations.

Wayne intensifies the power of her art by removing herself from it. Never does she insist that a painting’s vigorously worked surface refers back to her gestures or movements, preferring instead that each piece appears to have been formed by an impersonal impetus. This approach works beautifully, putting viewers face to face with forces beyond the scale of individuals.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Rose-Colored Glasses: Michael Lardizabal’s handsome photographs succeed at just about everything they set out to do. The problem with the 19 modestly scaled pictures at Jan Kesner Gallery is that they’re not very ambitious. Serving up tried-and-true subjects in well-established formats, they feel like throwbacks to an era whose glories and losses have already been sufficiently documented.

Meticulously composed, Lardizabal’s softly tinted pictures of abandoned factories, rusted bridges, fallow fields and weed-choked lanes are laid out according to a standard three-part format. Generally spacious foregrounds invite viewers into the images, whose middle grounds contain a range of focal points, including dilapidated homes, tidy clapboard towns, rushing rivers (shot at slow shutter speeds) and a dry-docked tugboat. More often than not, the backgrounds recede dramatically, fading into deep space or disappearing into the sun’s bright glare.

The manner in which Lardizabal prints his photographs matches their desire to savor the aura of a bygone era. Using a large-format view camera, he makes contact prints on a variety of papers with old-fashioned processes that employ silver, gold and platinum.

Although the tones of some of his prints include straightforward ranges of gray, from deep black to dazzling white, many images are shrouded in a sepia-toned haze or an artificially rosy atmosphere. By treating his camera’s lens as a pair of rose-colored glasses, Lardizabal obscures his art’s otherwise impressive technical proficiency.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through July 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.