Reverend Acres’ Menagerie Is Revealing

The Lord works in mysterious ways, but the Reverend Ethan Acres doesn’t have that luxury; he works as directly as possible. At Patricia Faure Gallery, his wacky menagerie of stuffed animals, motorized sculptures and mechanical puppets illustrate biblical stories, combining the fiery passion of a true believer with the sidesplitting showmanship of a born entertainer.

The Las Vegas-based artist is no slacker when it comes to presentation. With help from his wife, Lisa, he has sewn his extraordinary beasts out of easy-to-clean vinyl, fake fur and shimmering synthetic fabrics. Zippers and Velcro allow each creature’s stuffing to be unpacked, making it easy for Acres to take his show on the road.

Although he is not a typical fire-and-brimstone preacher, scenes from the Book of Revelation dominate his second L.A. solo show. Acres’ generous, all-embracing version of religion (and art) is evident in the way his best works mix and match metaphors in a dizzyingly inclusive stew.

For example, a piece hanging from the ceiling like a silent wind chime is based on the legend of the ourobouris, a snake that consumes its tail at the apocalypse. Acres’ self-devouring serpent resembles a cross between a sesame-covered bread stick and the Disney character Pluto, who, like any puppy, sometimes chases his tail. Pluto is also the Roman god of the underworld.

Lot’s wife makes an appearance as a giant salt-encrusted caterpillar, and an army of enormous human-headed locusts, complete with military helmets, dog tags and the stingers of scorpions, cover two walls. A massive swarm of bees swirl out of a lion’s carcass, illustrating a strange biblical tale about Samson’s sexual escapades.

Representing the parable that warns against casting pearls before swine, a group of five pink and white pigs with flashing red lightbulbs for eyes oink and jiggle as if possessed. This accessible yet unsettling sculpture serves as metaphor for the show as a whole. Visitors have the option to behave like the pigs or to respond to the multilayered messages embodied by the reverend’s good works, in which ancient myths are translated into contemporary formats at once wickedly funny and deadly serious.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Don’t Bank on It: Beverly Hills has a new Banco Popular Check-Cashing Outlet, courtesy of artist Glen Seator and Gagosian Gallery. Occupying a third of the facade of the Richard Meier-designed gallery, the sculpture of a storefront looks just like the real thing, with signs advertising wire services, bus passes, money orders and currency exchanges.

When you enter this Cash Express outlet, however, you realize that the international bank has not set up a branch on swanky Camden Drive. The checkerboard linoleum flooring and fake wood paneling are too new and tidy to belong to a real place of business. The absence of realistic details, like wastebaskets, brochure stands and gum dispensers, gives the interior the sterile presence of an unconvincing movie set.

And no employees are visible through the four security-glass windows at the counter. Instead, you look into the otherwise empty main space of the gallery, seeing the bolts and two-by-fours that support Seator’s structure, a nearly perfect duplicate of a real Cash Express counter at 1561 Sunset Blvd.

Four years ago, Seator reproduced a Santa Monica gallery’s office, placing the entire structure in the center of the exhibition space, propped at a 30-degree angle. Physically demonstrating that art has the power to turn the world on edge, this piece succeeded because it combined bodily impact, perceptual disorientation and a telling scrutiny of art’s place in the world.

By contrast, this new work has the presence of an overproduced gag. It reads as cliched social commentary because, rather than dealing with the mechanics and meanings of visual perception, it merely upsets social expectations. Passersby are probably not used to seeing a store of this sort in Beverly Hills, but doing so isn’t shocking or compelling.

Installed in the gallery’s rear exhibition space is a panoramic photograph shot at or near Joshua Tree National Monument. Like Seator’s simulated check-cashing store, the wraparound print is technically impressive. Otherwise, it has nothing whatever to do with the fake storefront, and does little more than hint at the artist’s own ambivalence about the turn his new work has taken.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through July 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Home Vision: Kevin Appel’s new paintings make his canvases from a year ago look sweet and old-fashioned--not quite clunky, but not nearly as taut or sophisticated as his latest computer-generated images of a dream home’s interior.

This isn’t to take anything away from the L.A. painter’s earlier works: They still rank among the best of his generation. It’s simply to suggest how much more ambitious and accomplished his impeccably painted, dazzlingly composed pictures at Angles Gallery are.

More space, more light, more precisely calibrated colors and more translucence suffuse Appel’s mural-size views of an airy home he designed in cooperation with OpenOffice, a New York architectural firm. Plus, more visual energy ripples through the interlocking triangles that represent leaves of neatly trimmed trees in the painter’s virtual world.

In the main gallery, Appel has hung a single painting on each of the four walls. Before he painted any of the works, he determined the composition of each by superimposing the floor plan of the house he designed over the gallery’s actual floor plan.

Consequently, what you see in each painting is consistent with what is depicted in the other works. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to fill in the in-between spaces, completing, in your mind’s eye, the home’s overall plan.

Its large windows, numerous sliding glass doors and ample patios facilitate the fluid movement from interior to exterior and back again. This illusory flow spills out of Appel’s paintings and into the gallery. Wherever you stand, you feel as if you’re in two spaces simultaneously, with one foot firmly planted in reality and the other in that of undeniable fantasy.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through June 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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What a Word: Everyone knows that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but many people still look at contemporary art and judge it by the words that surround it.

At Post Gallery, Brad Spence’s new paintings on paper fly in the face of this contradiction. Insisting that you look for yourself, these airbrushed images demonstrate that abstraction only gets going when words are left out of the picture.

Even Spence’s figurative works are abstract. The compositions and palettes of each have been faithfully drawn from the covers of philosophy textbooks and paperbacks--except for the words. No titles, names of authors, translators or editors get in the way of each piece’s design.

For example, “Irrational Man” depicts a knockoff of a sculpture by Giacometti, stoically striding toward the edge of a gray field. “Socrates” shows a bust of the philosopher, framed by a thin black line. “Metaphysics,” “Objectivity” and “Theory of Ethics” give respective shape to ideas about materialism’s shortcomings, science’s building blocks and morality’s unwavering ideals--without revealing any conclusions.

What’s most remarkable about Spence’s paintings is that they refuse to put philosophy above fashion. Forcing significance and style into an unlikely alliance, they undermine a fundamental assumption on which much of Western thought is based.

After all, inviting viewers to trust their responses to what they see is not the same thing as asking us to believe our eyes. The latter implies submission to an outside authority; the former puts each of us into the picture, where active participation is required.

* Post Gallery, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 932-1822, through July 3. Closed Monday through Wednesday.