Thrilling Images of Nature Throw Caution to the Wind

For 40 years, Joe Goode has made very good work, consistently turning out paintings that provide considerable, if restrained, pleasures. While it has never been difficult to like the artist’s abstract images, loving them has been another matter. Rarely have they triggered wild excitement, causing viewers to throw caution to the wind and risk making fools of themselves.

All this changes in a series of gorgeous new paintings at L.A. Louver Gallery. You don’t have to try to like their fiery fields of blazing yellow-oranges or to talk yourself into respecting the virtue of their soothing blue expanses, into which cottony clouds sometimes drift. From the moment you lay your eyes on these ravishing canvases, they bowl you over and keep on going. The thrills they generate sharpen vision, making the sky, sun and sea appear to be more vivid than usual, as if suffused with energy as electrifying as it is sensuous.

In terms of palette, Goode’s paintings couldn’t be simpler. Half of them glow with red-hot intensity, their molten surfaces a seething stew of sizzling yellow, burning orange, smoldering brown and smoky black. The other half are awash with an indescribably rich range of blues, from smog-tinged gray to wispy cerulean, saturated azure and tints so deep that all that keeps them from being black is their warmth.

In terms of subject matter, things aren’t so simple. On the hot end of the spectrum, Goode’s paintings appear to be tightly cropped sunsets, close-ups of forest fires, bird’s-eye views into the mouths of volcanoes or scientific photographs of the sun’s blinding surface. On the cool end, air and water predominate. Some have the presence of the sky under various weather conditions and at different times of the day. The rest recall what it’s like to look heavenward while underwater, with air bubbles rushing upward and the water’s dancing surface providing lively distortions.

The most complex component of Goode’s paintings is their surfaces. The best ones appear to consist of three or four opaque layers, into which so many tiny holes have been punched that it’s possible to see two or three layers lying behind it. This allows some of the watery works to convey the sensation that they’ve been burned, perhaps with acid. It also gives the fiery paintings a watery quality, suggesting that mysteriously condensed gases are integral to their otherwise bone-dry atmospheres, in which most liquids would evaporate in a split-second.

Goode achieves these effects by pitting oil-based paints against water-based ones. Never mixing with one another, these naturally repellent materials allow him to compress loads of visual incidents into razor-thin picture-planes. He creates quivering membranes of floating color as ravishing as they are fascinating.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Earth’s Power: The Center for Land Use Interpretation inaugurates its newly expanded galleries and handsomely renovated offices with an exhibition about decay. “Formations of Erasure: Earthworks and Entropy” is an eloquent meditation on the way things live in our imaginations, long after they’ve disappeared from the world.

Presented in the matter-of-fact manner of informational displays commonly found at the entrances to national parks and monuments, the exhibition is surprisingly poignant. By honestly documenting the current conditions of a dozen Earthworks made between 1968 and 1986, its 37 photographs and engaging wall-labels invite visitors to reflect on the Earth’s awesome power to swallow up ambitious human gestures--not to mention everyday ones.

The show begins sensibly, defining its subject in plain English. Without oversimplification or condescension, it distinguishes Earthworks from Land art, Earth art and environmental art, focusing on large-scale outdoor sculptures that were made almost exclusively from the stone, gravel or soil available at a particular site and, once completed, left to the elements.

To create the display, the center’s staff of artists and scholars pored over books and journals and then fanned out across the United States, photographing famous and less well-known sites in Nevada, Utah, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, New York and Maine. The images they brought back are humble, sometimes nondescript in their ordinariness.

James Pierce’s “Earthwoman” sculpture, inspired by the 30,000-year-old “Venus of Willendorf,” resembles a common mound of dirt overgrown with weeds. Nancy Holt’s “Star Crossed,” a roughly conical pile of soil pierced by a pair of viewing tubes, has the presence of a modern ruin, its empty reflecting pool calling to mind the broken dreams evoked by abandoned construction projects.

The photos of the most famous Earthworks are hauntingly different from the images of them commonly displayed in textbooks and catalogs (a selection of which is available for study). Robert Smithson’s 1,500-foot-long “Spiral Jetty” has a ghostly presence, its form barely visible beneath the surface of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which has risen since the sculpture was constructed in 1970. After 30 years, the geometric perfection of Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative” also has diminished, but the two 30-by-50-foot trenches the artist cut into the rim of a 1,500-foot-wide gully still offer an impressive spectacle.

The eeriest pictures are those from which nearly every trace of the original sculpture has vanished. Nothing but the foundation of Smithson’s “Partially Buried Woodshed” at Kent State University remains. All that is left of Heizer’s “Rift I,” a zigzag trench dug in the surface of Nevada’s Jean Dry Lake, is its often-reproduced image in books.

Permanence is an illusion. And sculpture, usually the most permanent of arts, sometimes lives on by disappearing into its surroundings. This is exactly how the Center for Land Use Interpretation functions, presenting information and then getting out of the way so that viewers can make up their own minds about the ever-changing world.

* The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through Nov. 15. Open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

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Past and Present: Think of a rock star who churned out a series of fast and furious hits for the first 10 years of his career, spent the better part of the next three decades spinning out background music for corporate sponsors, and is currently making a comeback with some easy-listening acoustical numbers. This will give you an idea of the general shape of Billy Al Bengston’s career, which is outlined in his first L.A. solo show in nine years.

At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, “The Good, the Bad and Nothing Heartless: Paintings From the ‘60s and the Present” acknowledges the ups and downs of the legendary pop artist’s oeuvre by skipping over the long, dull middle section. Although this openly promotional attempt to link a new series of modest heart paintings to some stunning pieces from the critically acclaimed phase of the painter’s career is unconvincing, it does give viewers plenty to look at. It also confirms that Bengston’s influential early works were so far ahead of their time that they still look fresh today.

The show consists of three sections. The first, consisting of oil and lacquer paintings on Masonite, canvas, paper and Formica made between 1959 and 1969, includes several jaw-dropping standouts. “Busby,” which resembles a cross between an over-the-top pinball machine and a full-dress military decoration, could hold pride of place in any museum’s display of postwar American art. “Hawaiian Eye,” “Meatball” and “Gardena Dracula” flaunt Bengston’s taste for garishly gorgeous color combinations, while “Ideal Exhaust” and “Gearbox” pay sober homage to the dangerous beauty of motorcycles.

The second is a candle-lit gallery, in which 11 of Bengston’s “Dentos” hang. Made between 1967 and 1971, these paintings on dented, bent and sometimes punctured sheets of aluminum represent literal collisions between fender-benders and traditional abstract paintings. Conflating accidents that happen on canvas with those that take place in the street, these pleasure-seeking paintings serve up both, as backdrops for romance.

The third section presents 13 small squares of finely sanded and colorfully tinted plywood on which Bengston has painted a single stylized heart. Framed by a variety of colored squares and reflective borders, these handmade valentines appeal to sweetness in such an innocuous manner that they come off as cliches.

The heart was among the first motifs Bengston painted 40 years ago. Unlike his early works, though, which are both edgy and accessible, his new ones are merely accessible. In art as in life, tough love is more important than indiscriminate affection.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 828-8488, through Oct. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Cat-and-Mouse: Technically speaking, Sandeep Mukherjee’s pictures of his nude body floating through space are drawings. Each meticulously rendered image consists of finely inscribed lines and delicately shaded areas on big, softly colored sheets of paper or semitranslucent sections of milky-white vellum. Beautifully framed, none physically enters three-dimensional space.

But experientially, Mukherjee’s drawings at Margo Leavin Gallery have the presence of sculptures. Although the India-born, L.A.-based artist folds, creases, indents, scores and pushes pins through the surfaces of his works, he manipulates a material infinitely more elusive than paper. Sculpting light, Mukherjee is a consummate draftsman who never lets you see his pictures without becoming acutely aware of the seemingly empty space between their surfaces and your body.

From some angles, his works appear to be blank. This often happens when you confront them directly, as if in a hurry to learn their secrets.

When you stare at one section of Mukherjee’s often large pieces, many of which measure more than 8 feet on a side, you notice that there is almost always more going on in your peripheral vision. But when you turn to scrutinize that section directly--focusing on a particular depiction of the artist’s body, or on the light reflected by an impression Mukherjee has made in the paper--the action slips elsewhere.

Playing cat-and-mouse with viewers, these supple drawings demand a light touch. Think of them as the visual equivalent of sneaking around on tiptoe and you’ll have an idea of the mischievous delights they deliver.

Although the artist’s lithe form appears over and over again, sometimes dozens of times in a single piece, there’s nothing narcissistic about his art. Causing viewers to drift around the gallery in a manner similar to the motions they depict, Mukherjee’s lovely works fuse the heightened perceptual acuity of classic Light and Space installations with the pleasures of classic figurative imagery, in a powerfully original fashion.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Oct. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.