Pombo Delivers a Festive, Colorful Package of Works

To step into Marcelo Pombo’s first solo show outside his hometown of Buenos Aires is to feel as if you’ve walked into a party. Depicting glitzy garlands, shooting stars and exploding fireworks, the 40-year-old painter’s 12 fabulous enamels on panel in the first room of Christopher Grimes Gallery are so celebratory that you can’t help but be affected by their high spirits.

From a distance, Pombo’s vividly colored paintings resemble infrared images of fantastic landscapes whose cellular structures are beginning to mutate. Some of the more fluid ones appear to be underwater worlds filled with thousands of animated microorganisms, sensuous sea plants and dazzling coral reefs.

Others recall early video games, in which trees are evoked by green rectangles set atop brown lines and flashes of light streak across your field of vision with laser-like intensity. Amid such anything-goes animation, berry-covered bushes dancing funky steps and tiny stars bursting in the background are as run-of-the-mill as any sunrise.

From up close, you see that each panel consists of thousands of tiny droplets of paint Pombo has meticulously dripped in specific configurations. Imagine an artist rendering each Benday dot that makes up a printed image as if he were painting a portrait, and you’ll have an idea of the attention Pombo has lavished on his eye-grabbing works. Many of the tiny circles consist of five colors dropped atop one another to form target-like configurations. Unevenly mixed spills of enamel and turpentine add to the seething vitality of these juicy paintings.

In the small back gallery, boxes that once contained jigsaw puzzles, fruit drinks, liqueur, toothpaste and a racy video have been festooned with bows, ribbons, pompoms and streamers. Pombo has even managed to transform a nondescript brick into an occasion for joy by bedecking it with glitter, sequins and costume jewelry.

But the best thing about his art is that its giddy thrills last a lot longer than the best party. Sophisticated about their silliness, Pombo’s abstract landscapes and extravagantly embellished packages assert that over-the-top decoration may not be found in nature, but the world would look better if it were.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Deep Inconsistency: Linda Besemer’s new paintings do everything her earlier works did--and a whole lot more. Exponentially more complex than a series of nearly square stripe paintings she showed almost two years ago, her current exhibition at Angles Gallery does not represent a breakthrough to some higher level of previously unexplored territory so much as an intensification of what the talented painter has been up to for years.

Made of nothing but pure acrylic paint, Besemer’s pliable stripe paintings celebrate the here-and-now. By attuning viewers to the gaps and mismatches between our abstract ideas about our surroundings and the actual stuff of everyday life, these deeply intelligent works transform seemingly incidental details into occasions for thought-provoking wonder.

The 13 paintings here fall into three groups: folds, drapes and slabs. Folded like towels over long aluminum rods, the first group presents both the back and the front of each piece. Because the part of the painting that faces the wall also faces the viewer, these two-faced works have nothing to hide and no secret backside. Rather than deceive you with illusions or invite your vision to penetrate their depths, they put a kink in what you think of as a single surface, a unified composition or a painting’s location in space.

Keeping everything on the surface, two nearly 9-foot-tall draped paintings catch your eye where they double back behind themselves before emerging to continue the up-and-down movement facilitated by their racing-stripe patterns. Your eyes must perform a loop-the-loop stunt just to keep up.

Likewise, Besemer’s slabs highlight the fact that painting, unlike geology, does not require viewers to search for hidden messages in the hope of disinterring buried treasures. Recalling geological cross sections of sedimentary deposits, these inch-thick, page-size slabs of acrylic initially suggest that a side-view will provide clues to the order in which the layers of stripes were laid down.

But each side repeats what takes place on the painting’s face. As with all of Besemer’s works, a viewer doesn’t travel back through time or into an ideal world of geometric perfection. Instead you experience the present’s inconsistencies more deeply.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Slowing Time: Robert Moskowitz’s first solo show in Los Angeles in 19 years presents 21 paintings on paper and canvas and four chalk drawings that are old-fashioned in the best sense of the term: substantial, well-built and anything but flashy.

So steady are the pleasures that accompany the New York-based painter’s emblematic images at Margo Leavin Gallery that a big, bright-orange painting of eight airplanes flying every which way is not out of place among 24 black, white and gray pictures of silhouetted buildings, lighthouses, smokestacks, roadways and lone wolves.

Titled “1999,” this seemingly anomalous painting gradually settles in with the rest. The motion implied by its variously sized aircraft slowly gives way to the same stillness embodied by Moskowitz’s other images. Have a little patience, it seems to say; what looks like chaos today will look different in a couple of decades, long after the impending drama of Y2K has passed.

For the past 20 years, Moskowitz’s reductive pictures have been discussed in terms of the way they straddle the division between abstraction and representation. Indeed, it is still difficult not to see his simplified depictions of the World Trade Center’s twin towers or a factory’s towering smokestack as poking fun at Barnett Newman’s abstract vertical canvases, whose compositions they echo.

But it’s more rewarding to view Moskowitz’s workmanlike paintings in terms of the way they embody time--slowing it down into long, drawn-out moments of unbroken stillness. Three works on paper, each a silhouette of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders, function as metaphors for the way Moskowitz’s pictures work. Holding things up, both temporally and visually, they give form to art’s age-old power to stop viewers in their tracks, getting us to regard otherwise ordinary things for reasons we can’t fully explain.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Intergalactic: Imagine falling asleep watching an animated cartoon about meteor showers, dreaming of the far-off places they came from and then waking up to find yourself surrounded by a roomful of oddly shaped, playfully colored objects that combine elements of both. The experience might be fantastic, even trippy, but it would probably pale in comparison to seeing Geoffrey Allen’s five new wall sculptures at Post Wilshire Gallery.

Each of the hefty yet whimsical works in the artist’s solo debut consists of a sturdy metal armature to which he has affixed precisely cast lumps of pastel-tinted Hydrocal (a light, quick-drying type of plaster). Often, as in “Oppathy,” “Mation” and “Freakproof,” these smooth, strangely configured forms resemble miniature landscapes--like those made by model train hobbyists, yet unlike anything found on Earth.

Atop such idiosyncratic bases, Allen has poured, dripped and squeezed thousands of puddles, droplets and squirts of watered-down Hydrocal. These frosting-like dollops recall partially melted candies, semi-dissolved capsules and cartoon worms.

Sometimes they seem to be animated characters scrambling hyperactively over the surfaces of the sculptures. At other times, however, it’s impossible to disentangle their writhing motion from that of their bases.

So overrun with squiggling visual energy is “Swarmdish” that you can’t be sure if there is solid ground beneath its interwoven worms. Similarly, the structure of “Orris That Binds” mimics that of Jupiter, the main difference being that the sculpture consists entirely of rings swirling around one another in loopy orbit.

Deftly combining the optical dynamics of abstract painting with the three-dimensional physicality of sculpture, Allen’s asteroid-inspired art playfully demonstrates that viewers don’t need to leave the gallery to go on intergalactic trips. Traveling through the imagination is sufficient--and a lot less difficult.

* Post Wilshire, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 932-1822, through Dec. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.