Truitt’s Sculptures Tease Notion of Reality

Anne Truitt’s first solo show in Los Angeles is as wonderful an introduction to the 80-year-old artist’s beautifully painted wood sculptures as it is belated. Truitt, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area for most of her life, is one of those rare artists whose work deserves a wider reputation than it has.

Her brand of idiosyncratic Minimalism, built around off-centered forms, sumptuous colors and compositions that are astutely out of sync with their underlying structures, looks right at home in Los Angeles, where artists who march to the beat of their own drummers do not face the same difficulties that they find in conservative art centers like New York, where every square inch of the art-historical pie is fought over as if it were the object of a hostile corporate take-over.

At Grant-Selwyn Fine Art, 13 sculptures and eight drawings made between 1962 and 1999 efficiently survey Truitt’s oeuvre, whetting a viewer’s appetite for more. Shaped like a barricade, “Hardcastle” (1962) greets visitors by symbolically blocking their way. At 8 feet high and only 3 feet wide, this tall black wall of a sculpture is easily circumnavigated, revealing, around back, a pair of angled braces painted bright red.

Hardly aggressive or overbearing, the restrained emotionalism of Truitt’s openly narrative sculpture shares less with real police blockades (whose width always exceeds their height) than with romantic fantasies about Medieval sieges, damsels in distress and other metaphorical struggles in which the pros and cons of defense mechanisms are weighed against one another.

In the rear gallery, two smaller sculptures from 1962 follow a similar format. Resembling sections of white picket fences with tips leveled and boards abutted, this pair of about 5-foot-tall works also rest on slabs of wood whose bottoms are notched, lifting them about a half-inch off the floor and giving their otherwise weighty solidity a dreamy lightness.

The rest of Truitt’s works are more unified in structure. Painted in a regal palette of burgundy, harvest gold and midnight black, two free-standing pieces from the 1960s are divided vertically, into two or three wall-like components. “Gloucester” (1963) looks as if it might be the Ur-source out of which Ellsworth Kelly’s abutted planes of saturated color spring, and “Knight’s Heritage” (1963) predates the organic palette and banded vertical format Brice Marden used to establish his reputation as an abstract painter.

In the 1970s, Truitt further simplified her solid wood sculptures, eventually arriving at the streamlined plinths that make up the majority of her works from the past three decades. To see “Twilight Fold” (1971), “Amur” (1983) and “Elixir” (1997) side by side is to take a time-lapsed tour of 30 years of artistic development.

Color builds in intensity, shifting from shadowy dove grays to deep plums before blossoming in eye-popping combinations of lipstick pink, screaming yellow, mint green and sweet lavender. Simultaneously, the geometric compositions painted on all sides of Truitt’s square forms increase in complexity, compelling viewers to regard these works from every angle--where they are anything but square.

The visual sophistication of the most recent pieces suggests that they are not sculptures at all but 3-D paintings. Ever the misfit, Truitt continues to go against the grain, making impossible-to-categorize objects in which simplicity and obliqueness play off of one another with delicacy, dignity and grace.

* Grant-Selwyn Fine Art, 341 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 777-2400, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pardo’s Pots: Jorge Pardo’s functional sculptures happily inhabit almost any context they’re put into. Unlike traditional works of art, which exert their authority or influence by standing out from their surroundings, the L.A.-based artist’s exceptionally well-adjusted works adapt to a variety of situations, disappearing into some while bending the rules of others. Like jacks-of-all-trades, Pardo’s ingenious objects work with whatever they’re given, leaving galleries, houses, patios, driveways, yards and gardens looking a lot better than before.

At 1301PE Gallery, 27 beautifully glazed ceramic spheres (each 2 feet in diameter) hold their own against various versions of Minimalism, particularly the organic strand. Using simple materials, low-tech fabrication processes and a natural palette that runs from creamy yellow through olive green to sky blue, Pardo’s untitled edition (made by Jose Noe Suro’s workshop in Tlaquepaque, Mexico) has a hands-on, bodily quality that emphasizes the four elements: earth, air, fire and water.

Scattered across the floor like the beads from a giant’s unstrung necklace, these shiny, colorful forms--with small openings on their tops and smaller ones on their bottoms--resonate against a strand of gigantism that runs through Pop Art.

Like Claes Oldenburg’s big billiard balls and Robert Therrien’s oversize furniture and tableware (currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Pardo’s king-size beads dwarf viewers, creating a sense of “Alice in Wonderland” illogic.

However, the formal games they play in the gallery are only the beginning of their lives as objects. When the show closes, its globe-shaped clay vessels will be dispersed--some sent back to the studio, others to storage and still others to people’s homes, where single examples and multi-part clusters will be put on pedestals (by collectors who like their art unused and perfectly preserved, presumably for resale).

But the most interesting ones will be those purchased by people who have the moxie to use them. As works of conceptual art, Pardo’s pots are incomplete until they are filled with dirt and put to use as the “bases” for living “sculptures,” including fruit-bearing trees, flowering plants and decorative bushes.

Over the years, the foliage will grow as the vases do their silent duty, protecting roots and dressing up domestic settings. In Pardo’s hands, works of art are life-sustaining objects that are as inseparable from their surroundings as they are responsible for making them livable--that is, cultivated in a well-rounded sense.

* 1301PE Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 938-6106, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Intrusions: At Kiyo Higashi Gallery, seven new paintings by Marcia Roberts make light feel palpable--but only if a viewer slows down the whiplash pace at which one usually speeds through a dot.com-stimulated day of 24/7 access and impatient instantaneousness.

If you’re in too big a rush, these quietly rapturous abstractions won’t get in your way. But if you give them a minute, they’ll repay your attentiveness handsomely, making each moment feel more expansive (and less jampacked) than before.

Roberts’ predominantly gray canvases share more with sunsets than traditional monochromes. Loads of color--including delicate blues, light aquas, hazy yellows, wispy pinks and ethereal oranges--suffuse their seemingly plain surfaces, some with such subtlety that you experience them more like changes in temperature than shifts in tint.

Ranging in size from 2 to 7 feet on a side, each of Roberts’ works consists of an atmospheric field of modulated gray around whose edges she has painted an asymmetrical border of duller, cooler gray. Within these unevenly angled frames appears a softly glowing X-shaped highlight--of the kind more often captured by cameras than seen with the naked eye, unless you’re squinting or crying.

The contours of Roberts’ highlights are impossible to pinpoint. Sometimes resembling folds of cloth, ripples of water or bends in car fenders, they recall Billy Al Bengston’s underrated “Dentos” and Robert Irwin’s magisterial discs.

Made of dozens of thin layers of acrylic, Roberts’ surfaces seem to record gradual accumulations of energy rather than to depict past events. They emphasize the present by changing significantly as you move around them and as sunlight moves through the room.

From three to 10 semi-translucent bars run horizontally across all but one of the paintings. Yanking the illusion of deep space back to the picture-plane, these intrusions unnecessarily restrict the expansiveness of Roberts’ art.

As a group, her patiently made paintings demonstrate that gray is not a neutral tone that merely fills space between black and white but that it is a full-blown color, as indescribable and uncontrollable as any other. By triggering perceptions and stirring sentiments otherwise missed in the unthinking rush to get things done, Roberts’ abstractions transform fleeting moments into lasting, if intangible, treasures.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-2482, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Lite Fantastic: “Paint, American Style” is a wildly uneven seven-artist show that uses the title of a TV show from the ‘70s to poke fun at the cloud of solemnity that sometimes hangs over painting, particularly abstraction. Like “Love, American Style,” which exposed embarrassing scenarios from the amorous lives of its characters, this exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery does not add up to a grand statement, instead highlighting the follies and accomplishments of unrelated artists.

At the gallery’s entrance, Carole Caroompas’ “Wild Is the Wind” and Tim Bavington’s “Supernova” squeeze viewers between their respective if queasy embraces of raucous rock-’n’-roll-rebellion and TV-test-pattern bliss.

In the main gallery, Vernon Fisher’s “Circle of Days” treats old-fashioned landscapes as dimly remembered escapes from the blitz of electronic stimulation.

Uninterested in the levity that marks much of today’s best painting, Scott Covert’s rubbings of gravestones and Ken Kelly’s symmetrical decorations fall flat. In contrast, Michael Reafsnyder’s explosively joyous panels carry on like a party that’s been put through a trash compactor yet still can’t be stopped.

Aglow with light that is too good to be true, Yek’s synthetic abstractions hum with energy so hot it’s cool. Like the other ambitious works here, a large part of their seriousness lies in their silliness.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.