For Hendler, It’s a Bright, Bright World

You would have to be afflicted with a fairly severe case of colorblindness not to have noticed that over the past few years computers and cars have been showing up in all kinds of newfangled colors. A current ad campaign for a series of specially painted Volkswagen Beetles, which can be ordered only online, links cars and computers, suggesting that the designers of both are paying attention to the emotional impact of the tones and tints we live with.

Although what they’ve come up with marks a huge improvement over the colors consumers have had to put up with for the past 20 years (especially in terms of cars and computers, where beige and the primaries have dominated), their best efforts still pale in comparison to the colors bodied forth by Maxwell Hendler’s extraordinary paintings. At Patricia Faure Gallery, 14 new monochromes, lovingly crafted over the past three years, take your breath away only to give it back--seemingly infused with more oxygen than you’re used to.

Giddiness, joy and exhilaration rarely come together so beautifully. The precision, intensity and subtlety of Hendler’s seemingly simple paintings polish one’s perceptual acuity, making the sunshine filtering through the skylights feel more sensuous (and sexy) than usual.

Described in words, Hendler’s paintings don’t sound like much: rectangular wood panels over which he has poured a layer or two of tinted or clear resin, wet-sanding them to glassy smoothness. But what these works do to you physically is not so simple.

Like some drugs, they crank bodily experience up to an inhuman, impossible-to-maintain pitch. The screaming yellow of “Speedball,” the dazzling azure of “Simulation” and the golden orange of “Doctor Mellow” deliver visual kicks with the unparalleled punch of chemically enhanced realities.

But unlike some drugs, Hendler’s concrete abstractions do not diminish one’s interest in ordinary experience. Four of his most amazing paintings compress, into solid chunks of color, the myriad ways swimming pools absorb and reflect light. The glowing edges of “Passenger,” the chlorinated aqua of “San Rafael,” the minty tint of “Agua Dulce” (which hints at the presence of algae) and the clear, glassy perfection of “Mas O Menos” transform a generic L.A. icon into a profound meditation on the richness of visual experience and the significance of hairsplitting differences.

Six generally larger paintings flesh out Hendler’s gorgeous exhibition. Ranging from strange, refrigerator-interior whites through cool, lavender-infused pinks to blazing fire-engine reds, they make for a show that transforms the bold colors of Old Glory into a saturated rainbow of proud idiosyncrasy, where highly individualized refinements give physical form to democratic ideals.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through June 3. Closed Sundays, Mondays.

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Impressive Debut: The six sculptures in Jason Meadows’ first solo show since earning his master’s in fine arts at UCLA two years ago look like works-in-progress. Built of wood, metal, fiberglass, medium-density fiberboard and an odd assortment of household items, these free-standing structures at Marc Foxx Gallery have the presence of unfinished projects often stored in the corners of a do-it-yourselfer’s basement or garage.

But there is nothing unresolved or half-hearted about Meadows’ fiercely intelligent sculptures. They are works-in-progress only because they treat each viewer as a physical component integral to their own complex structures, an objective element that must be finessed into place, either with the force of a firm hand or the delicacy of a soft touch.

To step into the main gallery, where five pieces are arranged asymmetrically, is to feel your body pulled in various directions simultaneously. Imagine that each of Meadows’ works, none of which rises more than 3 1/2 feet off the floor, is a planet from a solar system that has crashed, causing the gravitational pull of each mangled sphere to overlap with those of two or three others. This will give you an idea of the competing force-fields at work in the deceptively casual installation, as well as those that take shape within each indecorously bolted-together sculpture.

“Red Shift,” resembles a wooden bed frame to which a pair of diagonal braces has been added lengthwise. Six white legs, with stairway-like notches cut into their sides, slice through the horizontal frame at 45-degree angles to support disk-shaped platforms at three different heights. Only four of the legs touch the floor, making for a formally taut sculpture that is as physically unstable as it is visually animated.

Diagonally across the gallery, “Monster” stands like a piece of industrial-strength origami. Painted blue, its six V-shaped segments (cut from three-fourths-inch plywood) wrap around four gray components shaped like simple picture frames. A collision of crisscrossing diagonals and interpenetrating planes, this compact sculpture appears to expand and collapse as you walk around it, folding and unfolding its loosely linked elements as if all had wills of their own.

In the three other pieces, Meadows uses fluorescent light fixtures, mirrors, basketballs, bicycle tires and a table to create spatial warps that draw you into their orbit. From some angles, “Supercross” looks like an abstract accident at a bicycle race, its knobby, oddly angled tires appearing to bounce out of control. But from some positions, where one tire eclipses your view of the one behind it, the long, linear sculpture snaps to attention, visually telescoping itself so that it seems to inhabit a flat picture plane, like traditional drawings.

So adept at generating physical experiences are these abstract sculptures that they yank a few objects out of art history and into the present, where viewers can experience them anew. After Meadows, it no longer seems that a bicycle tire is the exclusive property of Marcel Duchamp. Nor do basketballs seem to belong to Jeff Koons; dumbbell-shaped limbs to Keith Haring; or tables with cut-away tops to Charles Ray.

Drawing equally on Anthony Caro’s levitating arrangements of metal, Jessica Stockholder’s everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink formalism and Greg Colson’s MacGyver-like improvisations, Meadows makes refreshingly original works whose impact transcends their sources. His solo debut ranks among the best of recent memory.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Discoveries: At once humble and ravishing, Ginny Bishton’s five photographic collages at Richard Telles Fine Art combine an acolyte’s devotion with a hedonist’s abandon to demonstrate that art can be ambitious without the ego of its maker getting in the way. Making generosity her modus operandi, the L.A.-based artist removes herself from the picture to let viewers get lost in abstract landscapes--one at a time, over and over again.

None of Bishton’s works on paper is wider than an ordinary doorway, so you’ll feel cramped if anyone tries to take in a view over your shoulder. By the same token, if you remember your manners, you’ll feel pushy intruding upon others. Like driving on the freeway, viewing art has its own etiquette, and these soft-spoken pieces firmly assert that civility counts and that patience is a virtue.

After all, more patience went into even the smallest collage than Bishton ever requires of a viewer. Each of her almost microscopically scaled compositions consists of thousands of tiny circles she has cut from snapshots she took on walks around neighborhoods in La Crescenta (where she used to live) and Burbank (where she recently moved).

Not much bigger than the head of a pin, Bishton’s meticulously snipped circles (she must use a fingernail scissors) have been carefully glued side by side to form organic shapes made up of meandering patterns. Sometimes their colors shift slowly, with different shades of green slipping from gold-tinted olives to watery aquamarines. At other times, sinuous rows and winding stripes--in pinks, grays and flashes of orange--emerge from the dazzling chaos of color. Large circles occasionally take shape, often in the red-to-purple segment of the spectrum.

The various sections of Bishton’s painstaking accumulations probably measure the duration of various sessions spent gluing dot after dot. But rather than inviting viewers to marvel at her dedication or be awed by the obsessive nature of her endeavor, she lets each area fuse with its surroundings, triggering such a variety of reveries that you forget how any were made.

Bishton’s endlessly fascinating collages recall ancient mosaics, stained-glass windows, Aboriginal sand paintings and the Ben-day dots in the Sunday comics. You can return to any one any number of times and never feel as if you’ve seen it before. Since it’s impossible to follow the same path through any piece twice, you discover something new every time you let your eyes do the walking.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Heavy Steps: The surfaces of David Stern’s paintings deliver just about everything a paint-lover could want from a thickly slathered oil on canvas: Drama, forcefulness and unapologetic excessiveness take aggressive form in the Germany-born, New York-based artist’s works. Paint, piled up and pushed around like there’s no tomorrow, has its own pleasures, and Stern’s L.A. solo debut at Louis Stern (no relation) Fine Arts serves them up with masterful aplomb and unflagging consistency.

These ordinarily admirable qualities, however, create doubts that gnaw away at this juicy body of work’s seemingly over-the-top vitality.

Despite all the signs of singular, unrepeatable gestures and stark, once-in-a-lifetime perceptions, Stern’s paintings look generic. His life-size street scenes and larger-than-life-size portraits feel hollow, as if the artist’s creative wheels were spinning or he were just going through the motions of capturing, in paint, the scenes and sitters he chooses.

As a whole, Stern’s paintings are plagued by a profound sense of disconnection between what they depict and how they depict it. Treating anonymous urbanites striding down the street as if every step they took was of monumental import causes his 6-by-4-foot images (which must weigh close to 100 pounds) to seem both bombastic and banal.

The more modestly sized portraits serve Stern’s freewheeling style much better. Rather than merely suggesting the jittery movement of a hand-held camera, his pictures of individuals sitting still embody a sense of psychological depth and ambiguity entirely absent from his larger canvases. Bigger is not always better and less sometimes does more.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through June 3. Closed Sundays, Mondays.