Spence Turns Over a New Leaf in Landscape Painting

In the summer of 1999, Brad Spence’s first solo exhibition took a quizzical look at the thorny relationship between painting and philosophy. At Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Spence’s second solo now takes on a similarly fraught connection--the one between painting and nature. Giving new and wonderfully twisted meaning to the term “landscape painting,” Spence’s show makes the gallery look like an otherworldly florist’s shop.

Fourteen painted sculptures made from altered houseplants fill the room, including display space in the front windows. Each plant is nestled in a clean, well-lighted white pot, and each pot is either bolted to the wall or standing on a simple white pedestal. The pots seem to grow from the all-white ambience characteristic of contemporary art galleries, which creates a specific type of context that here feels chilly and clinical.

Instead of depicting nature on a canvas, Spence has painted on the leaves of the houseplants. Subtropical caladium is sprayed in striations of bronze and gold, as if it were deciduous and autumn’s blazingly beautiful death-knell had sounded. A spiky pair of plants commonly called mother-in-law’s tongue is colored frosty blue and hung in opposition on the wall, one set of long, flame-like leaves hanging down while the other rises up to meet it. Individual blades of grass are painted in tiny stripes of red and yellow or blue and violet--think minuscule transistors--which make newly emerging blades of bright green grass look both refreshing and oddly alien.

The cleverest piece features a dense plant with tightly clustered leaves painted in a range of blues edged with splashes of white. One leaf near the center is pale yellow and hot pink with pinstripes of acid green--a little surfboard riding the waves of a roiling blue sea.

Pictures begin to form and stories emerge. Four identical plants in pots lined up along one wall get progressively more red-orange from left to right, suggesting a subtle narrative of cyclical destruction (“Controlled Burn” is the title). Another has leaves with purple spots--jaunty pattern and horrible disease. One large, flat leaf seems to have a cottony cloud painted on it--or is that the fuzzy image of some ancestral shrub?

Like the big succulents dramatically displayed in the splendid isolation of individual pots in the lobby of the Standard Hotel on the Sunset Strip, Spence’s gorgeous houseplants are pushed to a place that could be called terminally hip. Synthetic color trumps nature in his work, and trouble rustles in the bushes.

The acutely refined result is exquisite and seductive--and sickly, too, with the creeping look of illness. Spence’s unusually provocative show is slyly titled “Growth,” and it delivers both the thrill of progressive development and the physiological worry of a tumor.

* Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.

Form, Shape and Light: Alicia Beach knits together painting, sculpture and environmental installation to make works that extend the tradition of Light and Space art. In seven curious new painted wall-reliefs at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the complications multiply.

Beach paints vertical stripes on vertical slats of laminated birch plywood. The slats vary in height from about 4 1/2 feet to more than 7 feet, and they’re several inches wide and deep. Fifteen or 20 slats are spaced several inches apart in each work, with blank gallery wall in between them. The thickness of the laminated wood allows for some slats to be painted on three sides.

Visually, each painting reads as a normal rectangle--or, better, an abnormal one. The surface plane is usually flat and uniform, but the softly painted acrylic stripes create a disorienting illusion of fuzzy depth. Some of the paint is metallic, which further reflects light or makes it seem iridescent.

This illusion is still further complicated by concrete fact--the reality of the three-dimensional slats and the open spaces between them. In those spaces Beach’s painted color reflects off the white gallery wall, creating optical stripes of pure colored light.

In several compelling works the surface plane of the relief undulates. Using an ordinary wood router hooked up to a computer program, the laminated strips have been cut in ways that confound expectation.

“4/17/00 (my piano)” is the most aggressive, its apparently random undulations keyed up with vivid magenta, hot peach, mint green and sapphire blue, all of whose edges are picked out with contrasting pinstripes. “California” bows out from the wall at the center, but the pale pastel stripes that define the outer edges and the dark colors clustered at the center create a tense conundrum by reversing the visual norm: A deep hole seems to thrust forward in space.

In Beach’s strongest works, form slips into shape, then dissolves into light. Conversely, light becomes a tangible material. Never, though, is this process orderly, logical or succinct. Disorder, illogic and ravishing extravagance lead us into a more welcome matrix of imagination and play.

* Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-2117, through Oct. 11. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Order and Clarity: As an image, the equestrian usually has triumphalist overtones in Western art history. David Ligare, who for more than 20 years has been making consciously anachronistic paintings based on Greco-Roman ideals, acknowledges the tradition in a large new work titled “Areta (Black Figure on a White Horse),” while also asking what it might mean today. His answer seems to have more to do with the power of quotidian experience than with the power of authoritarian might.

“Areta” is one of 11 paintings and three drawings, most made this year, in Ligare’s exhibition at Koplin Gallery. A nude athlete is seated atop a horse, both of them life-size and posed stock-still on the beach, at what seems the break of dawn. With its clear, silvery light and carefully painted, all-over surface, which invites curious scrutiny, the picture seems less about recording past triumph than a pause in anticipation of the day that’s to come.

Old-fashioned triumphalism erected an empty hedge against mortality and death. Ligare’s version engages the sheer wonder of living. The strongest works in this show likewise pit mossy historical cliches against pretentious assumptions, as in two small, Italian Renaissance-style paintings of “Ideal Heads.” The more you look at them, with their elegant profiles set against vast expanses of cerulean sea and sky, the more you realize they’re just California surfers, dreaming perhaps about the perfect wave.

In paintings of a Florentine-style Baptistry as if rendered by Brunelleschi and an elaborated Ponte Vecchio arched above an Eakins-style rower in a single scull, Ligare uses order, symmetry, mathematical precision and clarity of light to create scenes of quiet disorientation and even eccentricity. Neo-Classical revivalism has nothing to do with it.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Oct. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Rearranged Weekly: The architectural sculpture by E Chen at Richard Telles Gallery feels like a pedagogical exercise in empty busy-work. Some chairs, a couple of doors, a window, half a picnic bench, a coffee table and an errant drawer are wedged into low walls built from proliferating “bricks,” which are actually wood blocks cut from 2-by-4s. The dull fragments of architecture and furniture define different types of socially engaged space, but here they are deflated into simple objects to be looked at in atypical relationships. They gain little in the process.

Set atop a platform of blocks, the configuration loosely recalls a famous 1967 Carl Andre installation of fire bricks at L.A.’s Dwan Gallery--albeit with a functional and representational twist, rather than the nonfigurative rigor of the precedent. The untitled ensemble is rearranged weekly by the artist, but its general lack of appeal doesn’t make repeat visits compelling.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Oct. 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.