Capturing the Transience of ‘Some Los Angeles Icons’

The principal icons in James Doolin’s swooning exhibition “Some Los Angeles Icons” are all quite familiar: traffic-jammed freeways, hectoring commercial signage and the concrete channel that passes for this city’s eponymous river. Such is the nature of popular symbols, which are always without surprises because they are known instantly by everyone.

Why then does Doolin’s engaging new show of Realist paintings at Koplin Gallery feel so flat-out peculiar? Perhaps it’s because we tend to regard icons as stable, enduring, even eternal, while L.A’s, because they’re modern, encompass properties of speed, transience and temporal passage. Old-fashioned cities like Paris or New York have the Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building, not the Pharaonic stack of ramps merging into the 110 Freeway and snaking toward downtown Oz.

Doolin’s rapturous paintings freeze this anomaly in place for our considered perusal. They stop in its tracks the steady freeway flow or ever-changing landscape of billboards, rendering them mysterious and spectral.

The Koplin show, Doolin’s first in eight years, features six large and 15 small oils on canvas or panel (the small ones are about a foot on a side). Also, installed in the gallery’s rear Project Room are four studies for a big mural cycle commissioned in 1994 by the L.A County Metropolitan Transit Authority for their new downtown headquarters.

A few of the small paintings are studies for the larger pictures, but large or small, Doolin’s paintings have the character of visual glimpses. These are places often seen during daily passage through the city: the ordinary desolation beneath a highway overpass; the late-afternoon glare on the side of a stucco building; a chaparral-studded canyon opening to the Pacific; a movie billboard looming above a “dingbat” apartment house and promising “7th Heaven.” Doolin’s keen eye for observation and his skill with composition give gravity and weight to common and ephemeral experience.

His handling of light is also critical, from the silvery radiance of wet concrete to the glowing coals of automobile taillights. The most powerful picture orchestrates assorted light motifs: At sunset after a rain, the jazzy neon sign in a psychic reader’s storefront window reflects off pavement puddles and seems to project itself into the red-orange sky above (the sky occupies three-fifths of the vertical canvas). The storefront is topped by a gigantic billboard, its emptiness aglow in blue fluorescence. The unseen promises of the commercial billboard become a poignant counterpoint to the psychic secrets held in the future and being advertised below.

Doolin has a gift for endowing the everyday with a sense of estrangement. His best paintings embrace a mad beauty associated with cartoons, which makes their factual realism all the more astounding.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Doesn’t Take Much: As a painter Sharon Ryan does a lot with a little. The mostly square birch panels in her new show at Sandroni/Rey Gallery can be almost 4 feet on a side, but there can’t be more than a few tablespoons of colored ink and gouache on any one of them. In materials as well as appearance, they’re spare in the extreme.

Ryan’s unframed panels stand out on supports a few inches from the wall, a format that emphasizes the surface plane. Each is covered with a pale transparent tint--yellow, green, pink, orange--which accentuates the natural pattern of the wood grain. But the translucent candy colors also make the wood look oddly artificial.

Which, because the panel has been through an industrial milling process, it partly is. The patterns of wood grain in her floating panels are bilaterally symmetrical, in a loose and imprecise way. The left and right sides can approach being mirror images, but like a human face or body the match is inexact.

Using a contrasting color--green on pink, for example, or purple on orange--Ryan picks out small fragments of the grain in delicate, sinuous lines. Sometimes the lines follow the grain closely, while at other times they seem to suggest a grain that isn’t really there. Willful decisions of the artist interact with the given properties of the panel, one leading the other at different turns.

The lines have the look of scars, hanging vines, creeping tendrils or fragile wisps of hair. The tracery is always at least vaguely sensual and sometimes frankly sexual, as protuberances seem to push into hollows.

Titled “Garden,” this quietly lovely show puts spare, abstract means to elusive, complex ends. Ryan seems intent on splitting the difference between what’s natural and what’s man-made; the result emphasizes that art is inescapably both.

* Sandroni/Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

Decals Stand Alone: In his terrific mid-career survey at the Santa Monica Museum of Art last year, Jim Isermann introduced something new in the impressive body of work he’s produced over the past two decades: vinyl decals, die-cut in geometric patterns and affixed directly to the walls.

Just as his sculptures and paintings in the past melded with traditionally functional objects like rugs, lamps and windows, the new decals did double duty as a kind of wallpaper. It looked great as an environmental backdrop for other art.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, Isermann is showing a new set of decals that ups the ante a significant notch. These decals stand alone, without functioning as a support for other works of art.

Here, wallpaper is everything. Floor to ceiling, corner to corner, the light-washed space of the gallery is surrounded by vibrant patterns.

The pattern is complex. Vertical stripes in red, orange, purple and blue march around the room. Staggered rectangles are cut from the stripes; so is a wavy, swelling, serpentine vertical line.

The serpentine sends the pattern swinging, giving the room a pronounced visual rhythm. The rectangles add wit: Like blank pictures, they frame empty fragments of white gallery wall.

Isermann’s art has always hinged on a careful fusion of Pop accessibility with more abstruse forms of Minimalist and Conceptual art. Andy Warhol’s cow-patterned wallpaper is one precedent for his new decals; Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings, which repeat a predetermined linear pattern that privileges an abstract idea over the autobiographical mark of the artist’s hand, is another.

The Pop aspect of Isermann’s art is crucial, though, because it flouts the puritanical strictures that so often bedevil the Minimal and Conceptual legacy. Isermann is the godfather of a whole crew of younger artists who have complicated such high-mindedness with heretofore belittled hobby-craft and household design--and for whom art is anything but an academic enterprise.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Holding the Light: The gorgeous new paintings by Roy Thurston at Chac Mool Gallery catch the light--but they won’t let go. The effect is uncanny. Imagine looking at the calm surface of a lake on a sunny day, while also being able to see into its depths; everything is surface while light seems trapped inside.

Minimalism melts into hedonism in these exquisitely crafted essays in visual perception. Thurston paints monochrome colors on smallish aluminum panels (the largest is 38 inches by 24 inches) or, in a few cases, composition board. Using thin layers of acrylic and polyurethane in sumptuous hues--hot pink, key lime, various purples, rust, metallic blue--he repeats strokes in what appear to be one direction: all horizontal or all vertical. The transparency of the color lets the light inside, while the brush strokes disperse it laterally.

In three paintings the linear brush strokes become fully three-dimensional: horizontal or vertical striations, sharp as a razor’s edge. (From the side, the ridges of paint make a saw-tooth pattern, like miniature clapboards.) Light seems to cascade down the surface like a waterfall, picking out highlights and casting shadows that are likewise held within the picture’s confines.

Somehow, the glossiness never reflects your curious face peering from a few feet (or even inches) away. Thurston’s bracing paintings radiate organic vitality without recourse to any naturalistic illusionism. They possess all the industrial “thingness” of a table or chair, while their faith in the spectator’s perceptual acuity extends the sense of wholeness beyond their physical boundaries.

* Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.