A Look at the Shifting Lines in the Battle That We Call Life

Mirit Cohen’s abstract drawings on torn sheets of cheap paper crackle with energy so ferocious that it’s easy to miss their fragility and sophistication. What is immediately evident in the 19 page-size drawings and three hand-held sculptures from the 1970s at Daniel Weinberg Gallery is that the virtually unknown artist had no interest in making pretty pictures.

Stripped of such niceties as shading, modeling and color, her pencil drawings consist of nothing but bluntly scrawled marks and wiry lines, configured in pulsating arrays of X’s, O’s, dashes, dots and ovals. These raw images fall into two groups: bird’s-eye views of diagrammatic landscapes and schematic figures viewed frontally, as if one were looking at ghostly portraits or enigmatic symbols carved in a cave’s wall.

Cohen’s landscapes resemble battle-ravaged terrains. Imagine a contour map on which a general had plotted the positions of his troops, armaments and barricades--and those of the enemy--and you’ll have an idea of the skeletal structure underlying her works.

But that’s only the beginning. The dense circuitry that takes shape in these harrowing drawings embodies the fury of battle, not merely the strategic calculations that go into its preparation or the gory aftermath that invariably ensues. Each of Cohen’s works has the presence of a series of superimposed time-lapse views of a battle whose front lines have shifted so often that time seems to have stopped, frozen in hellish stillness.

Intensifying the trauma is the fact that it’s impossible to determine which marks belong to one side and which belong to the other. Imagine battles in which various platoons (and troops within them) shift allegiances willy-nilly, and you’ll get a sense of how deeply Cohen’s art delves into chaos.

The crudely sketched heads and bodies that emerge from her more figurative drawings provide a touch of respite by suggesting tenuous connections between people and their surroundings. But these connective threads also resemble cages, barbed-wire fences and body restraints. In Cohen’s tightly structured works, every positive element has a negative counterpart.

Her fragile sculptures, collectively titled “Energy of Shrinkage,” give vivid form to the precarious balance maintained in her drawings. Made of copper wiring she has pulled from its plastic covering and woven in delicately knotted strands, some of these pieces enclose orange peels in spidery webs. Others look like eccentric pieces of jewelry, whose wires are no thicker than strands of hair.

Born in Uzbekistan in 1945 to Jewish refugees from World War II, Cohen grew up in Israel, where her work met with modest success. She emigrated to New York in 1975, where she attended graduate school and then drifted between the periphery of the art world and various psychiatric hospitals before committing suicide in 1990. The drawings and sculptures she left behind chart something bigger--and more terrifying--than her tragic life story.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through Aug. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Daydreams: Darren Waterston’s new paintings embrace the idea that atmosphere is everything. Handsome, evocative and dreamy, his ethereal pictures of light-saturated expanses at Kohn Turner Gallery are landscapes from which the ground has disappeared beneath your feet.

Terra firma is nowhere to be found in Waterston’s woozy oils-on-panel, whose abstract backdrops recall foggy swamps and misty mountaintops, although never with sufficient precision to let your perceptions attain any degree of certainty. Silhouettes of Chinese lanterns, decorative urns and statues of Buddha drift off in the distance with the delicious intangibility of daydreams.

The most precisely rendered (and seemingly substantial) components of Waterston’s elusive paintings are the monkeys, rats, moths, butterflies and birds that occupy their foregrounds. Sometimes these creatures scamper across branches, scurry through weeds or flutter around juicy pools of paint. At other times they appear to be stuck to the surface like scientific specimens--the painterly equivalent of trophies from a taxidermist’s shop.

When this happens, Waterston’s realistic animals aggressively ground your eye’s free-floating tour of deep space on his panels’ literal surfaces, nailing it there alongside the lifeless birds. Abstract flourishes, including loosely brushed smears, drips and spills of translucent paint, are offered up as substitutes, but all they do is make the obvious point that Waterston’s illusionism is neither seamless nor perfect.

For a painter who puts such a high priority on opening up spaces for unimpeded reveries, it’s strange that Waterston crowds so many elements into his images. In this sense, he is less a painter of imaginary vistas than a collage artist who uses open expanses as transitions from one element to another. Viewers are left with too little room to maneuver freely.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Aug 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fantastic Voyage: Kymber Holt’s splendid little paintings of magnified blood cells, exquisitely rendered internal organs and sumptuously colored microorganisms treat the human body as if it were an alien landscape filled with more breathtaking beauty than could be found in a rain forest on an unpolluted planet. Painted with a miniaturist’s precision, her seven oils-on-panel at Roberts & Tilton Gallery turn the tables on viewers, making you feel as if you’ve embarked on a fantastic voyage through someone else’s body after having been shrunk down to the size of an atomic particle.

In one panel (all of which were made between 1997 and 1999), a gaggle of luminous green sperm cells drifts from upper left to lower right, their whip-like tails tangled in a loose knot. In another, candy-colored blood cells swirl out of illusionistic deep space like a flotilla of inner tubes caught in a swift current. A third depicts a Fallopian tube’s inner wall as if it were a riverbed crisscrossed by deep gullies and sinuous ridges.

If Holt’s glistening images didn’t take you on impossible journeys that begin with extreme shifts in scale, they would too closely resemble Sharon Ellis’ mind-blowing paintings of worlds that are too good to be true. In any case, Holt’s four most recent pieces steer clear of the comparison by occupying territory all their own.

Painted over the past year, these more than 5-foot-tall watercolors contain the same bodily references as her tiny panels. This time, however, explicit references are camouflaged by complex patterns that are repeated with just enough frequency to suggest that they continue beyond the paper’s edges. Like sections of handmade wallpaper, Holt’s glorious watercolors make nature and artifice act in concert, forming fascinating worlds you can get lost in without shrinking in dimensions.

* Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through Aug. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.