Finding Chaos and Calm in the Pace of Modern Life

Speed and stillness commingle in Juan Usle’s new paintings, whose slippery compositions embrace extremes. Sharper in focus yet looser in gesture than anything the Spanish-born, New York-based painter has made since he started exhibiting in 1981, the 17 abstract images in his second solo show at L.A. Louver Gallery pinpoint moments of calm amid the chaos of modern life--especially as it’s lived in the fast lane. Usle’s irregular grids and fractured patterns intensify the pleasures of momentary respites by never letting you forget that mayhem and failure are just around the corner.

The installation quickly cues viewers into what the individual works are up to. In the center of the main gallery’s three largest walls hang the three most serene works: predominantly gray paintings in which the horizontal and vertical swipes of a squeegee create the impression of suspended animation.

Anchoring the exhibition is “Son~e que revelabas III,” a 9-foot-tall field of liquid light, whose silvery streaks recall a summer downpour frozen in midair by photography. The other two soothing works recall the blur seen through a subway car’s window as it speeds through a dark tunnel, where glistening brickwork punctuates the rhythmic sway and swoosh of the clanking train’s shadowy journey.

All around these tranquil centers swirl a world of hyperactive animation. Despite the small size of most of Usle’s paintings (all but three measure no more than a foot or two on a side), they pack lots of punch. So much optical verve is concentrated in their compact dimensions that each needs a large expanse of empty wall space to prevent the room from feeling claustrophobic. The most wonderfully overwrought ones are abstract fiestas in which loopy patterns cross paths and overlap in riotous dances of joyous abandon.

Usle unleashes the visual energy compressed in his small works in “Cornucopial,” a 7-by-4-foot explosion of line (ranging from wavy to straight, continuous to broken) and color (including translucent chartreuse, sun-bleached aqua and chalky wine red). Using a synthetic medium that evaporates rapidly, his dazzling extravaganza of painterly facility combines the fluidity of watercolors with the juiciness of oils-on-canvas.

Like his smaller works, “Cornucopial” appears to be a half-dozen translucent paintings that have been superimposed. With more room to maneuver, its diverse components seem to take on a life of their own, randomly interacting according to unpredictable whims. Eventually, it becomes clear that each of Usle’s paintings performs in the same way the installation does: by combining exuberance and control, craziness and calm.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through July 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Buffalo Gals: “Rodeo Girl” gives physical form to the kinky wholesomeness at the heart of American identity. At Jan Kesner Gallery, Lisa Eisner’s big color pictures of rodeo queens and ladies-in-waiting demonstrate that folks in Middle America are as tolerant of truly weird behavior as are their big-city counterparts.

Shot in Wyoming and Idaho, the L.A.-based photographer’s oddly charming portraits make wearing a tiara-topped Stetson seem perfectly natural. A sense of “aw shucks” humility permeates Eisner’s pictures, whose subjects are not at all self-conscious about their outlandish outfits. Borrowing freely from Liberace’s wardrobe, their sequin-covered blouses and rhinestone-studded chaps seem more appropriate to staged beauty contests than barrel-racing and calf-roping.

But the hearty teens and vigorous twentysomethings in Eisner’s images are too caught up in the competition to put too much stock in the symbolic value of their costumes. Bitter disappointment, scathing disapproval and stoic restraint are written all over the face of one lady-in-waiting, who casts an icy glance beyond the picture’s edge, presumably at the contest’s lucky winner.

Admiration and jealousy can be read in the tight-lipped smile a local rodeo queen wears as she meets Miss Rodeo America, her higher-ranking counterpart. The tables turn in another picture, when the same local queen dons a bright blue outfit and poses with an identically dressed blond. The only differences between them are the titles emblazoned on their sashes and the expressions on their faces: The queen is all self-satisfied vindication; her lady-in-waiting smiles dutifully, unable to hide her heartbreak.

All of the women Eisner portrays look as if they couldn’t care less about blurring the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. Far from urban centers, where gender-bending theatrics have become worlds unto themselves, these sensible, unpretentious rodeo girls throw themselves into crazy competitions as if they were the whole world. Sometimes, all that distinguishes country bumpkins from their cosmopolitan cousins is how much attention they think they deserve for accepting the complexity that makes individuals more interesting than stereotypes.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-6834, through June 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In Your Imagination: Much is hinted at and little is laid bare in Torbjorn Vejvi’s U.S. solo debut, a promising display of five formally sophisticated, conceptually coy sculptures. At Richard Telles Fine Art, the Swedish-born, L.A.-based artist’s intriguing pieces fuse abstraction and representation in order to short-circuit sculpture’s traditional relationship to space.

Made of such incidental, even flimsy, materials as cardboard, cloth, foam core, paper and vinyl (as well as thin strips of wood and sheets of Masonite), Vejvi’s human-scale structures borrow freely from painting, architectural design, magazine layouts and commercial window displays. Set on the floor, “In a Band” resembles an emotionally contained painting that has been cut, folded and glued into the shape of an open cardboard box. Inside, a silhouette of a studio musician occupies each wall, as if the four tiny band members were playing for no one but themselves.

Vejvi’s empty box seems to occupy a point in time that has slipped away, leaving its traces temporarily imprinted in memory. All of his works fold space in complex ways, capturing your imagination with their light-handed touch and dramatic shifts in scale.

Modeled on such common experiences as watching tennis on television, paging through an engraved edition of “Robinson Crusoe” or fantasizing about what Mondrian would have made if he were a sculptor, Vejvi’s carefully crafted objects inhabit a world in which the imagination rules.

Although the largest one stands nearly 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide, it doesn’t occupy space aggressively. Only 2 inches thick, “Puddle” takes its shape from the aftermath of a rain shower. Drawn in black marking pen on each of its sides are partial images of a young man as he catches his reflection in a puddle’s surface. Unlike Narcissus, Vejvi splits his image in two and tips it back so that it spills out of his vertically oriented sculpture, which functions like an old-fashioned picture frame or theatrical prop.

Unlike conventional three-dimensional works, which establish their impact by using mass, density and texture to momentarily defy gravity’s incessant pull, Vejvi’s materially slight pieces bypass such muscular struggles in favor of getting into your head. Like pop songs whose seemingly silly refrains won’t stop running through your inner ear, the 28-year-old artist’s deceptively simple sculptures resonate in your mind’s eye long after you’ve stopped looking at them.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through June 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pale Imitation: Presenting nearly 150 paintings, sculptures and photographs by Chicago-based artists Guy Aitchison, Michele Wortman and Chris Garofalo, “Biogenesis” is an overdose of an exhibition whose considerable visual pleasures are diminished by the regularity with which they’re repeated. At Julie Rico Gallery, the alternative realities and altered states of consciousness promised by the artists’ sensuous, color-saturated forms turn out to be rather conventional--far less mind-expanding than bland.

Aitchison’s series of imaginary landscapes brings his skills as a tattoo artist to oil painting. Titled “Mindtree,” these spectrum-spanning pictures give crisp linear structure to radiant spaces and undulating organisms that are heavily indebted to traditional mandalas and contemporary video games.

Wortman’s paintings are more loosely rendered close-ups of similar biomorphic elements, which often recall views through a microscope. Her photographs, sometimes mounted in modestly scaled light boxes, exploit the effects of macro-lenses in an attempt to endow tiny slices of the organic world with the mysteriousness of the cosmos.

Likewise, Garofalo’s ceramic sculptures of underwater flora and fauna--including exotic mollusks, starfish and coral--attest to nature’s hidden splendors. Despite the fastidiousness with which he duplicates various textures and tendrils, his works pale in comparison to the real thing, whose extraordinary details lose too much when rendered in ceramic and treated with glazes.

* Julie Rico Gallery, 208 Pier Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 399-5353, through Saturday.