Bringing Mullican’s Paintings to Light

At Grant Selwyn Fine Art, a fantastic group of paintings by Lee Mullican (1919-1998) pays tribute to the underrated artist’s originality and vision, making a place for his dazzling canvases and panels among the best works being made today.

So many major strands of 20th century art come together in Mullican’s abstract pictures that it’s amazing that these light-drenched images (dating from 1948-57) look as fresh as they do. This has as much to do with the painter’s light-handed touch as it does with the fact that viewers are just beginning to catch up with his art, which was not just out of sync with its age but also significantly ahead of its time.

Although Georges Seurat is credited with inventing Pointillism, there is no word for the equally potent technique Mullican developed and perfected. “Linearism” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, but it does describe the way he applied paint. Dabbing a palette knife into a pool of paint, he then pressed the tool’s edge against the surface of his work, laying out, one thin little line at a time, compositions suffused with intensity.

Because the palette knife pulled the center of each line into a slight ridge or crest, Mullican’s paintings are actually three-dimensional objects. Their louver-like protrusions of paint literally capture light while casting razor-thin shadows on their opposite sides. Looking at them from all angles accentuates their sensuous optical effects. The best ones are abuzz with otherworldly energy.

Consequently, Mullican’s paintings can be seen as precursors to the Light and Space movement, whose artists also paid attention to light’s effects on our perceptions. Likewise, his meticulously applied lines share affinities with John M. Miller’s riveting works from the past three decades. And, like Gerhard Richter’s supercharged abstractions (as well as the work of many young artists influenced by computers), Mullican’s canvases have the presence of three or four translucent images stacked.

But rather than suggest some sort of infinite regression, his all-embracing paintings push out into the world. African patterns, Navajo blankets and the masks of Northwest Coast Indians echo in Mullican’s earliest works. Almost hallucinatory in their evocation of multiple realities, his increasingly fine-tuned images from the 1950s draw on various aspects of Zen enlightenment to forge a type of down-to-earth transcendentalism all their own.

* Grant Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 777-2400, through July 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Abstraction Surprise: Relentlessly formal yet hardly formulaic, James Richards’ weird paintings look as if they were made by a punk in sheep’s clothing. These highly inventive works manifest an abrasive disdain for false manners and pious solemnity while never proposing that destruction for its own sake is interesting. The young artist’s idiosyncratic abstractions generate an impressive range of surprisingly refined experiences, all the more powerful for being so unexpected--and so far out in left field.

His eight new works at Shoshana Wayne Gallery take painting back to the basics. Each consists of a wooden frame built, more often than not, of 2-by-4s. Richards sometimes uses a blunt pencil to scrawl lines on these pieces of lumber, or burnishes them with a metallic coat of graphite. They also do double duty as stretcher bars, over which he strings hundreds of feet of nylon string, coarse twine and colorful yarn.

Clotted globs of acrylic paint interrupt the random yet intelligible networks formed by Richards’ crisscrossing strings. Often these copper, silver, pink, orange and lime-green fragments recall hapless insects caught in webs woven by giant spiders with no sense of symmetry. Occasionally they appear to be spindly tentacles, thicker versions of the twine they cover. A few of the strangest ones simultaneously resemble cauterized arteries and cigarette burns in cheap upholstery.

Besides being a talented visual artist, Richards is a musician. Once you know this, it’s impossible not to think of his abstractions as silent homages to broken guitar strings. Like those little failures that testify to the fury and urgency of a passionate performance, Richards’ discombobulated paintings demonstrate that mistakes and breakdowns do not necessarily detract from an endeavor’s success, especially if it’s done in the right spirit--and with sufficient energy and ambition.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through July 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Darker Drawings: Marcel Dzama’s new drawings pick up where his last ones left off--in the middle of enigmatic stories whose beginnings are shrouded mystery and whose endings, while neither grim nor gloomy, are anything but cheerful. Darker, more violent and not nearly as sweet as the Winnipeg-based artist’s L.A. debut a year and a half ago, the 400-plus works in his second solo show at Richard Heller Gallery continue to draw viewers into the picture by giving shape to the moods that define a large part of contemporary life.

A sense of I’m-at-the-end-of-my-rope desperation suffuses many of Dzama’s delicately rendered images. Others evoke exasperation, rage, futility or resignation.

But all is not lost in Dzama’s imaginative drawings. A good number depict apparent foes, like tough gunslingers and larger-than-life-sized worms, sharing a smoke, having a drink or coming to one another’s aid. Succor, camaraderie and compassion play an equally important role among the mutants and misfits who populate the 25-year-old artist’s strange world.

In this menagerie of anthropomorphic animals, machine-like people and all sorts of hybrids, blue-fleshed aliens, dressed in American suits from the 1940s, dance with 6-foot-tall cats. The suits scientists wear to protect them from radioactive contamination are adorned with the same shapes atop the heads of the Teletubbies. And mice, pigs, fish, bears and shapely women--dressed in Captain America’s form-fitting outfit--cross paths with Herman Munster, Sneaky the Snake, Wiener the Worm and the Tin Man, who appears to have spawned a group of kidlettes shaped like martini shakers.

One of the best things about Dzama’s exhibition is that you can look at the same picture again and again and never feel you know the whole story. Combining just the right amount of subjective involvement and cool detachment, his art invites empathy without being manipulative. Made of inexpensive ink, ordinary watercolors and root-beer syrup, Dzama’s curious drawings broach big issues unpretentiously.

* Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Logjam: Mark Housley’s “Adventures in Logland” is an unadventurous exhibition that includes almost a dozen cartoonish paintings and about twice as many variously scaled sculptures of comic-strip-inspired logs. The comfortably crowded show at Delirium Tremens Gallery breaks no new aesthetic or thematic ground, exploiting, instead, the tried and true charms of conventional naive styles.

Housley’s crudely painted pictures have a down-on-their-luck feel that begs for sympathy without offering much in return. His papier-ma^che logs are slightly more engaging. Most sprout four stick-figure legs, which suggest that they are symbolic animals--probably pets--whose anthropomorphic qualities tug at one’s heartstrings.

Unfortunately, Housley does not do much to develop the narrative or metaphoric component of his animated figures. Most just stand there, like inarticulate emblems. In this state, they seem to be the dimwitted second-cousins of the main character in “The Giving Tree,” a much more interesting story whose simplicity doesn’t prevent it from conveying a powerful message.

* Delirium Tremens, 1553 Echo Park Ave., Echo Park, (213) 861-6802, through June 27. Open Friday-Sunday only.