Facts Yield to Truth in Fuller’s Loopy World

Like “South Park” and “The Simpsons,” Leon Fuller’s works on paper demonstrate that cartoons are not just for kids anymore. At Richard Heller Gallery, approximately 100 page-size pieces by the 30-year-old artist combine a childish style of drawing with snippets of text that are anything but naive.

Mixing references to American history, current events and B-list celebrities, Fuller’s offbeat version of image-and-text Conceptualism outlines the programming for an imaginary channel that, until very recently, would never be seen on TV. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to fill in a full season of shows from the wickedly humorous material in his schematic drawings.

Some resemble magazine covers, featuring articles on such fictitious personages as Xuxa Annenberg, prime minister of East L.A., and Cher Foley Horkheimer, who stars alongside Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan and Vanessa Williams. A direct-to-video exclusive promises a behind-the-scenes report on Xuxa Simpson, Palmdale’s secretary of commerce, and the colorful cover a new CD proclaims: “The Best of Courtney Hole.”

Conflating movie posters and tabloid headlines, a slightly larger image is emblazoned with the phrase: “Bob Crane wants to know: Who killed Colonel Hogan?” Many others advertise melodramas with hilarious casts of characters, including David Hasslehoff, Yasmine Bleet, Angelyne, the Spice Girls, Sugar Ray Leonard, Frito Bentivoglio, Oksana Peitrenko, Elizabeth Montgomery, Pocahontas Rawalpindi and a ballet instructor named Cicciollina Clinton.

A series of diptychs pairs scenes drawn in marking pen with computer-printed production notes. One tells the life-story of Charo Meneghel, a Brazilian model for Robinsons-May Co. Another rewrites history, saving Natalie Wood from drowning. A third acknowledges that Forrest Gump’s suit is courtesy of Bonavitacola America.

The most elaborate narrative unfolds in a 26-part storyboard for “Baywatch Babe.” Beginning with a full-screen credit for Seiji Ozawa, who conducts an all-animal orchestra for the show’s soundtrack, Fuller’s script careens from an ordinary day on the beach to an explanation of how a hapless dog transformed a Thanksgiving turkey into a dish of Peking duck.

At the end of Fuller’s insightfully loopy program, more credits roll, informing viewers that George Washington Carter wrote the teleplay, which was based on a story by Abraham Lincoln Washington and directed by Theodore Roosevelt Lincoln. Like Fuller’s best works, this sharp-witted piece of his fantasy life sidesteps pesky facts to tell deeper truths about the media-saturated world in which we live.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Of a Complex Nature: In seven new paintings at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Tim Ebner continues to use the type of naturalistic illustration common to National Geographic for his own off-kilter purposes.

It takes time to adjust your eyes and joggle your mind to get used to the idea that a 6 1/2-foot-square realistic depiction of a brown bear standing knee-deep in the crashing surf while extending one limb high overhead is subtle--in any way, shape or form. But that’s exactly what Ebner’s rewardingly idiosyncratic picture does. Transforming what sounds like a silly one-liner into an image that holds your attention, this painting, like all the works in his oddly beautiful exhibition, sustains an experience of enchanted fascination that is rare in the fast-paced world of contemporary art.

Artistically, “Untitled (Waving Brown Bear)” is a high-wire act with no safety net. A misstep in any direction lands Ebner in the realm of unremarkable illustration or anthropomorphism’s schlocky sentimentality.

What saves the painting from either fate is the way it fuses compositional awkwardness, painterly aplomb and resonant metaphors. You’re never certain whether the bear’s extended front leg is the result of artistic license or natural happenstance--whether the creature is waving to you like an old friend or simply frolicking in the surf, making unself-conscious gestures that we read human meanings into.

What is clear is that Ebner finds such unresolved conundrums to be perfect armatures for his painterly activities. To look closely at his canvases is to see that their inscrutable subjects provide him with a terrific format in which to experiment with the way paint creates material illusions.

The texture of organic substances plays a central role in all his works. For example, the gigantic snapping turtle in one close-up is subordinated to the part of the painting where the seemingly prehistoric beast digs its reptilian claws into the muck on the pond’s bottom. Likewise, a full moon rising over a primordial landscape of bubbling lava serves Ebner’s desire to paint light as it passes through gaseous vapors. And two other bear pictures focus on the animals’ coats, emphasizing the difference between dry and wet fur.

Think of these materials--viscous muck, poisonous vapors and wet bristles of hair--as metaphors for the physical facts of painting, namely oil-based pigments, their fumes and the tips of brushes. This will give you an idea of how Ebner’s images work on more than one level, lending lasting complexity to what initially seem to be simple pictures.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through April 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Seas of Tranquillity: Roberto Gil de Montes’ new paintings and drawings depict reverie-infused solitude as an experience fundamental to our humanity. In contrast to worldviews that assert that conflict defines us as people--and that disputed dialogues form the caldron in which truth is forged--the painter’s romantic landscapes and hedonistic figure studies contend that tranquillity is the source of our best thoughts and highest aspirations.

At Jan Baum Gallery, 10 oils on canvas and panel range in size from 5 by 7 inches to 8 by 4 feet. Time seems to stand still in these works. In “Hombres,” 13 individuals fill a bright sandy beach yet never intrude upon one another’s space. Gil de Montes’ homage to respectful distance provides a deliciously Mediterranean counterpoint to Seurat’s famous painting of hollow bourgeois pleasures, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (1886).

Eight modestly scaled gouaches on handmade Nepalese paper give form to the ethereal side of Gil de Montes’ project. These quickly sketched notations replace the juicy physicality of oil paint with the ever-fading splendor of fond memories.

All of Gil de Montes’ dreamy pictures have the presence of singular moments that he has managed to make more expansive, drawing out their pleasures while never letting their intensity diminish. In the backgrounds of several paintings, a solitary island appears just off the coast, as if it has detached itself from the mainland because it needed a little more space.

In “Center” and “Under Venus,” silhouetted palm trees run around all four edges of each image, providing a tropical frame for the island while collapsing two views into a single perspective. The trees suggest that you’re lying on your back, staring up through palm fronds and branches at the sky above. The central image tips you back up on your feet, returning you to earth but not without transforming your view of life’s simple majesty.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through April 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Through the Lens: Alison Foshee’s collages, made from clear droplets of glue that have been peeled from newspapers in various languages, are lovely in a gee-whiz sort of way. At Dirt Gallery, the artist has arranged this simple element--which ranges in size from the head of a pin to a half-dollar--into two configurations: approximately 10-inch-square wall works and a casual cluster of about 50 floor-bound stacks.

Each tiny hemisphere of solidified glue has the presence of a lost contact lens. In the wall works, these elements provide viewers with slightly magnified and mildly fish-eyed views of the letters, characters and word fragments that appear beneath them, sometimes in black-and-white and at other times in candy colors. Laid out to form stripe, polka-dot and random patterns, these pieces are perfectly pleasant, if less than riveting.

Foshee’s floor works are less successful. To make these she has glued up to 35 droplets of glue atop one another, forming tiny, stupa-like sculptures. If you get down on all fours, put your head on the floor and look through one eye, the array of cone-shaped works captures some of the wonder of dioramas. But it ignores the aspects of language and through-the-lens intimacy that gives Foshee’s wall works their charm, suggesting that she has not yet found a way to translate the modest pleasures of her droplets into a more ambitious format.

* Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., (323) 822-9359, through April 22. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.