Some Theatrical Reflections on Alienation and Illusion

There’s nothing subtle about the four steel and fiberglass sculptures in Anish Kapoor’s first solo show in Los Angeles in nine years. Painted in a palette of screaming reds (from candy apple to fire engine) and polished to a dazzling sheen that puts the chrome on a lowrider to shame, the artist’s glistening works at Regen Projects make mirrored disco balls look understated.

Even so, Kapoor’s embrace of Las Vegas garishness does not prevent his extravagantly theatrical sculptures from generating experiences of profound ambiguity. Indeed, all of his works give palpable form to an existential sense of disassociation--of being in the world but not of it.

The largest piece, a concave disc mounted on the wall opposite the door, initially appears to be a giant rose-colored globe floating in midair. But there’s something off-kilter about your impression that Kapoor’s sculpture displaces a lot of volume. Its apparent mass has the shimmering intangibility of a hologram. After a few moments, you’re able to see through the illusion that its center protrudes furthest from the wall.

What’s more difficult to get a grip on is the relationship that takes shape between your body and the sculpture’s slippery surface. From across the gallery everything is reflected upside-down in its mirror-like finish. As you approach it, everything flips around and the world appears to be right side up again.

But not quite right. As you stand a few feet from Kapoor’s work and turn your head to take in its full dimensions, your reflection zips across your field of vision as if speeding by like a car on the opposite side of the freeway. Imagine what it’s like to stand still as you watch your shadow race around you, and you’ll have an idea of the out-of-sync sensations this increasingly enigmatic sculpture generates. The world seems to be whizzing by too swiftly to make sense of it.

The other three pieces distort your perception of scale. Set on the floor like a tacky garden ornament that has lost its pedestal, a nearly black orb resembles a pearl of gigantic proportions. A single drop of blood, made from a 6-foot-long section of glossy fiberglass, looks as if it has the consistency of spilled mercury.

Another wall-mounted work, “7 Ways In,” the only object with straight lines and square edges, has a navel-like indentation in its center. Reflecting viewers in triplicate, both upside-down and right side up, its hollow core puts an experience of infinite regress front and center.

The icy beauty of Kapoor’s art derives from its capacity to bring a 19th century idea of alienation into the present. Rather than using slick surfaces and sumptuous colors to gloss over chilling emptiness, his deadly serious works use these ordinarily decorative elements to make your blood run cold.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Mortar Master: At Margo Leavin Gallery, a series of 40 painted collages by Roy Dowell embodies ethics in the only way art can: indirectly, by showing rather than telling.

It is impossible to read specific statements in any of the artist’s intimate, page-size abstractions. Even though it’s clear that all of his works on paper are made from carefully cut sections of posters that have been peeled from the walls of boarded-up buildings, the meanings of the original messages are completely subsumed in the vibrant visual stews Dowell cooks up by mixing and matching unrelated elements.

The insistent illegibility of his punchy works overrules the idea that art is a form of self-expression. In Dowell’s case, art is a way of life. His show’s title, “Like Love, Built on Precedent,” drives this point home with the same generous equanimity of all his open-ended abstractions.

An architectural quality suffuses these remarkably stable works, whose additive, part-by-part structures recall the gridded consistency of brickwork or the interlocked solidity a mason is able to wrest from an otherwise chaotic pile of irregularly shaped stones. In Dowell’s carefully balanced images, handmade marks, both drawn and painted, function like mortar, holding the cut-and-pasted fragments together in wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The cumulative aspect that gives each piece its internal rhythms also takes shape among the 40 uniformly sized works in the show. To see what Dowell has done (over and over again) in an extremely limited format is to get a good feel for the sustained daily labor that goes into his brand of art-making.

Steering his way between the plodding repetitiousness of merely punching the clock and the freewheeling exuberance of unfettered creativity, his artistry is even-keeled, steady and measured. It involves adjustments and compromises, weighing one element against several others and determining what is the best all-around arrangement. Details are fiddled with, and contrasts are fine-tuned, but neither goes on endlessly. After all, Dowell is less an obsessive out for perfection than a pragmatist in search of an ad hoc solution.

His work as an artist has a lot in common with that of a repairman. Both begin with things they didn’t invent but about which they have intimate knowledge. Both operate on used objects that have seen better days but are too valuable to discard. And both use finesse or muscular force, depending on the job’s requirements.

In a sense, the art of collage is about as glamorous as that of repair work. Lacking the drama of painting and the touch of drawing, it plays second fiddle to both. But, as Dowell’s humble works boldly demonstrate, playing second fiddle has nothing to do with being second-best, especially when you play your heart out.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through July 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Asteroid Abstractions: For a good part of the 20th century, painting and photography seemed to be at war with each other. These days, with many painters borrowing techniques from photography and just as many photographers using painterly effects in their images, it no longer makes sense to think of such cross-fertilization as sleeping with the enemy. Far from being strange bedfellows, the two intermingle promiscuously, giving birth to all sorts of uncategorizable hybrids.

At Patricia Faure Gallery, Jason Eoff’s color-saturated abstractions push things to the next level. Drawing inspiration from outdated video games and classic American abstraction, the young artist’s eye-popping images force art and entertainment into an unlikely (if logical) marriage.

Simultaneously fun-filled and thought-provoking, this high-keyed exhibition presents three bodies of work, each of which consists of pieces that are two paintings in one. To make these works, Eoff first pours a thick layer of resin over a wood panel, polishing it to a slick, reflective sheen. Forming solid monochromes, pinwheel-shaped patterns or atmospheric fields of electrifying color, these elements would hold their own as complete paintings--if Eoff let them.

Instead, he treats them as backdrops. After the resin has dried into a glassy surface, he uses stencils and palette knives to carefully slather up to six additional layers of juicy oil paint atop it. Forming starbursts, circles and clusters of tiny asteroid-shaped fragments, these components are also sufficiently animated to stand on their own.

In his best works, the translucent backgrounds propel the oil-painted shapes into the three-dimensional world. Recalling video games from the 1980s, in which asteroids and enemy spaceships threaten to crash through the screen, some of Eoff’s images seem to freeze time, suspending a split-second in eerie perpetuity.

Others disperse such singular moments evenly across their surfaces. Neat grids of starbursts deliver the all-over energy of action painting in a comic-strip format, serving up jolts of visual stimulation as graphic symbols of the impulses our optic nerves transmit whenever we open our eyes.

The only works that fall flat are the most conventional. Eoff’s grids of variously colored circles cover too much of the background to generate sufficient figure-ground tension. As a whole, his exhibition demonstrates that painting works best when it marries contrary components. If you don’t like to entertain ideas while being entertained, Eoff’s hyperactive art probably moves too fast and loose for you.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through July 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cutting Edge: Francesca Gabbiani’s first solo show consists of two dozen pictures she has made by cutting brightly colored sheets of construction paper into increasingly detailed shapes and gluing them together to form strangely beautiful images of buildings, bugs and forests. Contrary to expectations--and to the dictum that practice makes perfect--her most captivating collages at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are not the most elaborate.

Although 11 page-size works, each depicting one or two insects, clearly required the most manual dexterity, they do not hold your attention much longer than it takes to admire Gabbiani’s skills with scissors--which are considerable. Once you’ve marveled at her capacity to render, in two dimensions, every fine hair on a spider’s tiny legs, the wonder diminishes.

Similarly, the young artist’s five landscapes do not increase your curiosity about the world they picture so much as they flaunt her facility to cut out convincing silhouettes. An image of a forest fire and another of a forest floor covered with hundreds of leaves seem to have been chosen only to allow Gabbiani to impress people fascinated by models of famous buildings made from toothpicks or portraits made with macaroni.

In contrast, her eight pictures of mom-and-pop businesses, such as Echo Beauty Salon, Scorpion Tires, Club Tee Yee and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, are not as obsessive in their realism as are her other works. Consequently, they raise questions that are much more intriguing than “How did she do it?”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Gabbiani’s urban scenes is that they invite you to wonder what the world would look like if your eyes were digital devices. Subtle color gradations are translated into all-or-nothing shifts from one sheet of construction paper to another. The same logic is at work in digital imagery, every tiny slice of which is only one color.

Gabbiani’s best works depict a world whose colors are too good to be true but whose contours seem to be out of whack. Combining the enchanting awkwardness of a schoolkid’s art project with the alienating imperfection of computer technology, her deceptively simple cutouts capture some of the oddness that gives modern life its anxious edge.

* Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through July 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.