Sense of Self Exists in Theobald’s Landscapes

In a quietly ravishing show at Cirrus Gallery, Gillian Theobald presents landscapes that have less to do with physical locale than with locating the self within a broader realm of being. Theobald, formerly of San Diego and Los Angeles and now settled in Seattle, has focused on the earthly elements for well over a decade, paring down her views to their distilled essence. Reductive in one sense, her paintings are expansive in another--suffused with deep, open-ended reverence.

Specific places may have inspired this body of work, but details of those places have been shed. A few poplars or eucalyptus hug the bottom of each canvas; only their tops are seen, and predominantly in silhouette. From this low, modest horizon, the eye sweeps upward to a rich field of color, a sky of violet, putty, lilac, pale coral or a rapturous range of blues.

Most of the works in the show are diptychs, pairs of “Night and Day” canvasses where the cluster of trees stays the same in each, but light and color shift, and with them the translucence or opacity of the foliage.

Serial attention to a particular subject under varying conditions of light and weather goes back at least a century, to Monet and his temporal impressions of haystacks and the facade of Rouen cathedral. Theobald, too, evokes precise sensory moments, but not only for their own sake as perceptual records.

When the eye and mind move from the reassuring familiarity of the horizon to the luxurious, mysterious depths of the space beyond, the evocation of a particular moment converges with a glimmer of a vaster spiritual schema. The intimate faces the absolute.

Theobald mentions Rothko’s work in a gallery statement, and her paintings do have a similar intensity. Their concentrated energy and meditative power are also generated by the resonance of adjacent bodies of color. But she is also kin to Romantic and American Luminist painters, for whom landscape embodied the divine, the sublime.

In Theobald’s paintings, landscape becomes a vehicle for a higher order of thought and feeling. The beauty of her work feeds the soul, offering it a place of serenity and connection.

* Cirrus, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through Jan. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Going to Extremes: Three new shows at Ace Gallery extend Duchamp’s legacy to its most depressing extreme: Anything can be art, even something devoid of engaging form, meaning or conceptual intent. What’s left? Nothing but a sorry demonstration of the art world’s excessively democratic embrace of the young and the new.

Irish-born Kirsten Glass makes large paintings of a single, vibrant color with phrases from popular songs running along a stripe of white on the bottom edge of each canvas: “Hit me baby one more time” beneath a slab of purple; “Good good good like Brigitte Bardot” alongside a field of aqua; “It’s all so sugarless” paired with acid yellow; and so on (a few of the texts being unprintable). Slick and banal--a popular combination these days--Glass’ paintings make fortune cookies seem like dense philosophical treatises.

Vincent James’ sculptures look like they came straight from Disneyland’s Toontown. Each object--binoculars, mousetraps, broom--has the exaggerated ebullience of a cartoon. Made from foam-core and painted solid, unmodulated colors, the British artist’s work is a technically proficient gimmick. It teases the eye and elicits a chuckle, then vanishes from the mind without even a cartoon poof to mark its absence.

The installations of L.A.-based Oliver Irwin have a dumb charm but are largely puerile exercises in self-indulgence. In one he choreographs standing floor lamps to switch on and off to a new age synthesizer soundtrack. In another he mounts small video monitors on artificial potted plants, with one screen showing him making bird calls.

One quirky contraption is a faint echo of the much savvier work of Tim Hawkinson. Irwin lays stacks of Styrofoam plates and take-out containers, cups, napkins and paper food cartons on the floor, looking as if they’d all tipped out of a supply closet.

At intervals, a thin metal rod running through each stack rotates, sending a squirmy shudder through each group of objects. The title? “I’m starting to like her friend.”

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-4411, through January. Closed Sundays and Mondays.