John M. Miller’s Paintings Angle to Get the Viewer’s Attention

John M. Miller’s paintings are phenomenal--in both senses of the term. Fully apparent to the senses and extraordinary in the experiences they generate, the stunning canvases at Patricia Faure Gallery harbor no illusions about how art works. Laying everything they’ve got on the line, the only mystery they present is why they keep you interested in their seemingly simple arrangements of angled bars.

Of course, you may be entirely uninterested in Miller’s art. But that’s a risk he willingly takes. Based in the conviction that each viewer is in the best position to determine what’s best for him or her, Miller neither proselytizes nor panders. His art is for grown-ups. If it seems out of place today, that says more about the contemporary art world than the works themselves.

Four paintings in the main gallery form the show’s heart and soul. A single bench divides the rectangular space into two unequal parts, with a three-color painting on the left and a group of three black-and-white canvases on the right. The installation’s structure mirrors that of each piece: What takes place between the paintings also takes place within them.

Titled “Ritual,” the exhibition’s centerpiece is a red, black and white masterpiece made of four tightly joined vertical panels, across the surfaces of which march hundreds of sharply angled bars regularly interspersed with pairs of shorter, even more steeply angled bars. Each raw canvas panel contains a single color--from left to right, the sequence is white, black, red, white.

The bars that cross from one panel to the next visually rivet together the four-part painting. The vibrant intensity of the central sections is softened and expanded by the warm whites that flank them. Where the dense midnight black meets the blood-red paint, a strange bluish tint glows like a halo.

This mysterious phenomenon takes place entirely inside the eye, where Miller’s colors don’t mix or blend as much as bounce off one another. To look closely at these excruciatingly precise works is to see that although they are perfectly finished, they are neither hermetic nor off-putting. On the contrary, your experience of their tautly structured planes is what they’re all about.

Autonomy and open-endedness similarly dovetail in the three paintings at the gallery’s opposite end. Mirror images of each other, “INEX-I” and “INEX-II” create complementary sensations of compression and expansiveness. Hung between them, the largest painting in the show, “INEX-III,” establishes a pulsating rhythm that likewise reveals that when art moves you it’s impossible to distinguish between interior and exterior phenomena.

Two smaller galleries present works made of tape and wood, materials Miller has never before exhibited. The most interesting are three 20-inch-square panels, whose surfaces are covered by three different configurations of tape. The one on the right, with pairs of short angled bands sandwiched between longer bands, is the source for the bars in all the paintings in this exhibition--and nearly all of Miller’s canvases of the past 28 years.

By comparison to the permutations in the other two small works, the one on the right is more harmonious and balanced. As an organizing principle, it simply seems right--as if every molecule had suddenly snapped into place, letting you see things with unparalleled clarity and focus.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through April 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Childhood Into Adulthood: Over the past five years (and three solo shows in Los Angeles), Yoshitomo Nara’s cartoon-inspired art has grown in size, presence and power, while simultaneously becoming more subtle, dreamy and insidious. At Blum & Poe Gallery, an oddly enchanting two-part exhibition establishes the young artist, who was born in northern Japan and divides his time between Nagoya and Cologne, Germany, as one of the leading sculptors of his generation.

In 1995, Nara’s U.S. debut consisted of 20 charmingly dark drawings and a single wall sculpture, all of which depicted prematurely jaded juveniles, whose ill demeanor suggested that adults need the illusion of childhood innocence much more than kids do, as a nostalgic escape from the responsibilities of our quietly terrifying lives.

In 1997, Nara presented 10 meticulously fabricated wall sculptures that resembled larger-than-life-size death masks of cartoon characters. Including a grinning bunny, a round-eyed pilot, an angry kitten, a little lamb and a pair of profoundly dissatisfied girls, these menacingly cute creatures had the presence of taxidermied trophies of parental fantasies about their children’s upbringing.

Today, Nara’s multi-part sculpture gives impeccable physical form to three Snoopy-like dogs, which walk on stilts as they circle an empty water bowl. With their eyes closed, they seem to be sleepwalking. Titled “Dogs From Your Childhood,” Nara’s serene sculpture fills the gallery with an aura of breathless wonder, taking viewers back to a time when real dogs were taller than we were.

For the second part of the show, the dogs will be replaced by three gigantic coffee cups, in each of which floats a Brancusi-like stack of two, three or four heads of children. Titled “Quiet, Quiet,” these masterfully fabricated fiberglass, urethane and acrylic sculptures are sweetly surreal in their conflation of adult dreams and oversize children’s toys. Less aggressive and direct than Nara’s earlier works, they intensify their impact by means of understatement.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through March 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Historical References: Sandro Chia’s new paintings are a blast from the past that fails to resonate in the present. The Italian Neo-Expressionist has not been exhibited in Los Angeles since 1984, when big paintings of simple subjects done in historical styles were all the rage. Today, times have changed, and such Postmodern samplings of history’s highlights look frighteningly unambitious. At Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum of Art, the painter’s 24 oils-on-canvas (all made in 1998) demonstrate that just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will work today.

Chia’s variously sized canvases generally depict a solitary man in a wooded landscape. Sometimes this lumbering cartoon of a figure holds a palette and paintbrush, a book or some other symbolic prop, such as a pair of hearts. At other times, he simply stares off into space, resting peacefully beneath a stylized tree or standing awkwardly beside a brightly colored dog, like a gigantic balloon floating above a New Year’s Day parade. About a quarter of the paintings picture pairs of figures, whose postures and simplified gestures echo one another’s.

What’s most remarkable about Chia’s ponderous paintings, which exude a sense of lugubrious inertia, is the way they borrow stylistic maneuvers from Cezanne, the Symbolists, the Fauves and the Cubists. The problem with such shameless appropriations is that they pale in comparison to their sources. It’s simply wrongheaded to think that contemporary painting can resuscitate previous styles or rescue them from oblivion. The early 20th century masterpieces to which Chia refers are doing quite well on their own.

* Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 456-4851, through March 28. Closed Mondays.

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The Unexpected in the Everyday: A modest survey of Ruth Orkin’s black-and-white photographs highlights the well-known photojournalist’s talent for capturing the unexpected moments that make a day memorable. At Jan Kesner Gallery, 33 gelatin silver prints, mostly made in the 1940s and ‘50s, convey a sense of well-meaning sweetness and unself-conscious affection.

“Spencer Tracy on Location in NYC Reacting to a Female Photographer” (circa 1950) shows a group of 10 well-dressed men--with surprise written all over their faces--pointing and staring at Orkin, who doesn’t appear in the photo because she snapped it at just the right moment.

The image has all the ingredients of a contentious feminist confrontation, with one man in the foreground appearing to challenge Orkin’s presence. Everyone else appears to be amused and excited, if not downright delighted, that a woman has been sent to do a man’s job. Not a trace of condescension mars their expressions.

Orkin’s most famous photograph, “American Girl in Italy” (1951), casts the relationship between the sexes in less amicable terms. Surrounded by 15 men of all ages who look, leer, smirk and whistle, a solitary woman strides purposefully, struggling to act as if she can’t be bothered by such crass behavior. The psychological antagonism at the root of this image distinguishes it from Orkin’s other works.

One of her few close-ups depicts three teenage girls peering out of an airplane’s round window. Having just landed in Israel, these Jewish refugees from Iraq express a complex mix of relief, trepidation and hope. Other standouts include a sequence of six prints that show three children sitting around a toy wagon playing cards as if their lives depended on it; four pictures of purebred dogs interacting with their less-than-purebred owners; and a shot of her daughter Mary pretending to shave, just like her father.

Part of the charm of these photographs by Orkin (1921-1986) has to do with the era in which they were made, when life appears to have been simpler, and people treated strangers better than we do today.

Part of their power has to do with the pioneering role she played in a field dominated by men. But most of their impact results from Orkin’s eye for intimate moments, when a split-second speaks volumes about our emotional connection to the everyday world.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through April 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.