Concrete Realities in These Abstractions

A flawless installation of eight exceptional paintings by John McLaughlin (1898-1976) inaugurates Daniel Weinberg Gallery, which has returned to Los Angeles after a five-year stint in San Francisco. The domestic scale of the beautifully proportioned and recently refurbished building, which is accented by a tasteful arrangement of modern furniture, including chairs, cabinets, a coffee table, lamp and vase of flowers, provides the perfect setting in which to see McLaughlin’s astonishingly intimate abstractions.

Installed one to a wall in two sunlit rooms, the oils on canvas and Masonite panel recall what the late Nicholas Wilder, McLaughlin’s previous dealer, said about him. Wilder coined the term “Bedroom Painter” when he noticed that many of his clients would hang a painting by McLaughlin in the living room--and then, after a few weeks or months, move it to the bedroom, where they’d live with it even more intimately.

This exhibition of works made between 1949 and 1973 highlights the fact that although McLaughlin’s mature paintings may initially look reductive, minimal and austere, once you get to know them they are actually approachable, generous and expansive. The more time you spend with them, the more clearly you see how they fuse the seemingly contradictory experiences of serenity and stimulation.

The gallery’s low ceilings increase the paintings’ architectural presence. Anchoring the first room is a 4-by-5-foot horizontal canvas painted black. Located in its bottom half, a pair of vertical white rectangles tug the entire expanse of blackness downward, directing the painting’s impact to your solar plexus rather than your brain.

Along with this gravitational pull, the contrasting tints in “#6, 1973” behave as if they were full-blown colors rather than mere variations of gray. If the white bars obeyed the logic of tonal contrasts, they would pop forward as the black receded. But McLaughlin has managed to get the white to push the deep black into the room, reversing standard figure-ground relations and heightening your bodily involvement with his art.

Each of his paintings functions by tweaking a viewer’s deep desire for balance and symmetry. The compositions of five are slightly but significantly off-center, close enough to geometric order to bring perfection to mind while far enough away to remind you that reality is too complex to be treated ideally.

The remaining three abstractions are symmetrical. But their pastel blues, soft yellows, cool grays and sandy browns have more or less visual weight than the whites and blacks that predominate on McLaughlin’s palette, tipping it away from centered stasis to off-balanced improvisation.

The decisions that McLaughlin made in arranging the lines, bars and blocks in his paintings are not all that different from the decisions a designer or an architect makes in arranging planes, spaces and objects. When done at this level, such precisely articulated thinking departs from the realm of abstract ideals and enters the real world, where, on rare occasions, art and design gracefully dovetail.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 954-8425, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Off the Beaten Path: Rodney Graham’s “75 Polaroids” is a piece of Photo-Conceptualism from that style’s heyday that still resonates today. At Patrick Painter Inc., this 1976 installation physically demonstrates that the act of taking a picture has very little to do with the art that results. Equally suffused with skepticism and humor, the Vancouver, Canada-based artist’s work asserts that while photography may shed sufficient light on an artist’s surroundings to get him out of the woods, most viewers are more interested in getting lost there, at least metaphorically.

To make this series of images, which resemble low-budget, over-lit film stills, Graham got off the beaten path in a large park in the middle of the night. Armed only with a Polaroid camera (and a backpack filled with film and flashbulbs), he used these instruments as a makeshift flashlight, snapping pictures of the trees, foliage and ground cover in the general direction of his path back to the parking lot and the safety of his car.

What viewers stumble upon in the dark gallery is a similarly unfamiliar setting, in which one’s bearings are momentarily lost. At the far corner of the cavernous space stands an approximately 12-foot-square shed, whose three interior walls have been lined with tiny pictures of trunks, branches, leaves and dirt.

As your eyes adjust to the darkness, the more you’re able to see the Polaroids’ dimly lighted details and the less you feel as if you’re visiting a cross between the Unabomber’s cabin and a location for “The Blair Witch Project.” What once seemed creepy and dangerous, like a crime scene that had not yet been taped off by detectives, takes on the quality of a clever exercise. But the piece’s capacity to haunt never goes away completely.

The best part of Graham’s exhibition is his installation’s embrace of theatrical extravagance. In contrast, the other more recent and less ambitious works fail to engage viewers physically. Based on bookish references to Marcel Duchamp, Donald Judd and On Kawara, these dry works make you long for the B-movie mystery of “75 Polaroids.”

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Dec. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Rich Fields: The 14 larger-than-life- size paintings by Michael Goldberg at Manny Silverman Gallery were all made between 1960 and 1963, a time when the New York-based abstract painter had stripped his art down to the bare essentials. Almost all of these oils on canvas consist of solid fields of earthy color through which thick linear elements seem to plow--slowly, stubbornly, even defiantly. Efficient in the extreme, the spartan gestures out of which these works are built orchestrate raw dramas packed with emotional power.

Most of the roughly vertical and nearly horizontal lines that cross Goldberg’s scarred fields of weathered brick red, deep chalky green, crusted muddy brown and dense smoky black start at one edge and fall just short of reaching the opposite edge. In “The Wife,” for example, a nearly 9-foot-long segment of bright white, which has been applied by scraping a wide palette knife across the canvas, appears to travel from left to right, dropping slightly and petering out just before completing its journey.

In “Brigham Young/House in Salt Lake,” four similarly troweled lines evoke the presence of a simple architectural element, such as a door’s posts and lintel. But in Goldberg’s potent painting, the structure is incomplete and damaged. Still parallel, the pair of posts lie on their sides, and the lintel is split in two, fractured as if it had been through an earthquake. In other works, the vertical components rarely touch down on the bottom edge, suggesting shaky foundations and the potential for instability.

Without any of the bombast that sometimes accompanies abstract painting of this magnitude, Goldberg’s abstract images are suffused with a palpable sense of tragedy. As humble as they are heroic, they tell moving stories about determination and willpower, struggles against adversity that take place in every aspect of modern life.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through Dec. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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On the Contrary: In Steve Galloway’s new paintings and drawings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery, form and content are at odds with one another. Rather than working together to deliver clearly resolved messages or present harmonious compositions, these components appear to have contrary goals.

For example, the largest oil on canvas, which measures more than 6 feet square, depicts a big black furnace as if it were a holy icon. Just a wisp of white smoke drifts from one of its seven chimneys into the clear sky overhead. Underfoot, a monkey, chicken and rat begin to investigate the metal structure’s dark interior as a spider scurries away with a blue velvet sack.

Profoundly out of sync with the common barnyard setting, the monumental scale of the furnace raises more questions than it answers. So does Galloway’s virtuoso paint handling. You find yourself wondering why anyone would lavish so much talent, attention and time on such a clunky, unattractive object, whose purpose and use are never made clear.

Likewise, an exquisite charcoal and pastel drawing of the seashore beneath a night sky filled with sparkling stars lures you in with its beauty before taking a turn for the weird. In the background, a shark bites a floating lamp, while in the foreground a tarantula ponders a map of constellations. In other pictures, anthropomorphic buildings, plants and machines stand in desolate landscapes, as eyeballs come to life and wander the world in search of who-knows-what.

Having one foot firmly planted in medieval Europe and the other in contemporary California, Galloway’s paintings make odd bedfellows of such disparate artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Bruegel, Jim Shaw and Vija Celmins. A master at making narrative paintings whose stories have been short-circuited, Galloway leaves viewers with the sense that something profound has been lost--but that something else, perhaps even more intriguing, is to be found in its remnants.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Dec. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.