Imagination at Play in These Improvisations

Painterly improvisation rarely looks as good as it does in the work of Thomas Nozkowski. His small paintings feel lavish because they’ve been lavished with care.

At Ace Gallery, the New York-based artist is showing 13 paintings, 10 from 1998 and 1999 and the rest from the previous three years. (Nozkowski last showed at Ace in 1996.) They come in two standard sizes, with no side larger than 28 inches. All the work is horizontal.

Often, large horizontal abstractions allude inescapably to the space of landscape; Nozkowski’s smallish ones instead suggest the page or tabletop, and thus an internal rather than external space. They are contained, concentrated places for the play of imagination.

And what a fertile imagination it is. Nozkowski puts together shape, color and texture in ways that keep leading your mind to a figurative connection. At the last moment, though, they veer off into other, wholly unfathomable directions.

Graffiti tagging, with its visual tension between the assertion of identity and the cover of anonymity, seems to be one source on which he draws. The mad, malleable, illogical elasticity of cartoons is another.

Tertiary colors are prominent, and their “in between” quality is matched by the variousness of the oil paint, which is typically brushed, scraped, layered, thinned, dribbled and laid on the linen support with a crisp edge--all in a single work. Dense with visual incident, Nozkowski’s fresh and invigorating paintings champion thoroughly hybrid realities.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-4411, through July 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Fields of Snow: On first regard, the large multi-panel photographs by Italian artist Walter Niedermayr have the look of abstract paintings. Specifically, they recall field paintings. Flat, planar and anti-illusionistic, the photos erase clear distinctions between subject and ground, yielding the visual suggestion that each panel is only a fragment cropped from a much larger field.

Closer inspection of the work in his second solo exhibition at Angles Gallery reveals something quite different. The whiteness that dominates each of the six works, whose multiple panels number from two to eight, turns out to be snow. The small colorful marks dotting the whiteness are people--skiers, hikers, snowboarders--scattered like pepper on a plate, or sporting equipment erected for use, such as slalom gates and ski lifts. These photographs of leisure in the French and Italian Alps, shadowless and without ready markers to calibrate scale, are initially disorienting.

Indeed, disorientation seems to be central to their task. Chronicling snowboarders, a triptych 51 inches high and more than 10 feet wide shows busy clusters of bodies engaged in odd pursuits. The flat whiteness is unyielding, but prolonged scrutiny eventually reveals what must be some sort of horizontal trough dug into the ground and running across the three pictures, into which tiny figures disappear and from which others emerge. At the right, scores of waiting figures swarm like bees.

Feelings of displacement, witnessed in the simple juxtaposition of fragile human beings in overwhelming natural settings, are given formal heft as well. It’s next to impossible to determine Niedermayr’s vantage point on these mountain scenes--where he stood to take the picture, whether up the slope or down, or perhaps from a chairlift or gondola.

Instead, your eye seems adrift in space. Horizons almost never appear, offering an anchor. And when they do--as in one picture whose upper right corner suddenly plunges into a deep void, revealing mist-shrouded mountain valleys beyond--it doesn’t help to stabilize the viewpoint.

The subtle tensions between pristine nature and an encroaching tourist industry are given eloquent testimony in these pictures. Field paintings were once an argument for the material truth of art. Niedermayr’s unexpected adaptation of its means for his camera work is among the quirkier examples of today’s ongoing rapprochement between photography and painting.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Awash in Meaning: For a 19th century artist like Ingres, the luxurious quarters of the bath provided a subject that was exotic, erotic, feminine and ripe for the kind of abstraction that could create a controlled, idealized, distinctly male Eden. For Dave Deany and Dave Hanson, by contrast, the bath is a wilder wallow--mutant, sexually warped, and psychically (and maybe physically) toxic.

At Side Street Projects Gallery, the two Daves have built two working spa tubs. One bubbling caldron is embedded in a kind of igloo made from cool, pale-blue foam bricks, topped with dollops of bright white foam that seem to ooze and melt down the sides. The other tub almost disappears inside bulbous, fleshy mounds of pinkish foam, from which dozens of plugs of streaming auburn hair cascade (think Barbie’s head, fresh from the oven). Overhead, a Mylar mirror is part playboy bedroom castoff, part amplifier for an extra crispy suntan.

Gallery visitors are invited to use the “cold” tub and the “hot” tub (though on the day of my visit one was out of order). Deany and Hanson offer a makeshift changing room, where the walls are adorned with lush paintings of dreamy waterfalls, and they provide loaner bathing suits and towels. After your soak, you can rinse off in the open shower, jerry-built from a lawn sprinkler, blue plastic tarps, a kiddie wading pool, a circulation pump and water whose cheerful green hue is (one fervently hopes) a sign of disinfectant additive. A rustic picnic area stands off to one side, while feeble potted plants and battered turf decorate the hapless urban grotto.

The exhibition’s title, “Gymnosophore,” seems to be a genetic splicing of gymnospore (an asexual, undeveloped seed) and gymnosophist (an ancient sect of naked Indian ascetics). The title, however pleasantly arcane, also seems right on target. This queasy, eloquently ramshackle bathing suite is appropriate to our social moment--a people’s day spa for the Bush Era.

* Side Street Projects Gallery, 400 S. Main St., (213) 620-8895, through April 28. Open Friday and Saturday and by appointment.

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Idyll Overturned: When Fred Astaire tap-danced across the floor, up the wall and then miraculously across the ceiling in “Royal Wedding,” audiences cheered. They knew it was a cinematic trick, but so what? Joyful release from the mundane constraints of ordinary life appeals to the yearning for freedom of just about everyone.

It appeals to Martin Kersels too, but it comes at a price. Every heaven has its hell, and in a terrific new video he puts them both together.

“Pink Constellation” is the riveting centerpiece of Kersels’ otherwise haphazard show at Acme. Shot (like Astaire’s movie) in a full-scale room specially built by the artist to rotate 360 degrees, the video opens with scenes of a young woman acrobatically cavorting through space. A dog shows up for a walk on the wall (the girl hides beneath a four-poster bed). Eventually she’s replaced by the artist--and then the trouble starts.

The pink bedroom’s girlish furniture starts to slide across the floor, chasing Kersels onto the side wall, then up across the ceiling. A table, a dresser, then the bed and other assorted stuff follow, threatening to engulf him. Suburban bliss, represented by a girl’s sweetly idyllic room, quickly dissolves into chaotic dishevelment--a parental nightmare of the world turned upside down.

The visual wit and psychological complexity of the video far outstrip the show’s six descriptive sculptural works, which include a maquette of a spinning house, a twirling log cabin trailing long strands of knotted rubber bands and cutout photographs of figures tumbling through space. Given the trenchant video, they seem like pale afterthoughts.

* Acme, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through Saturday.