A Breakthrough in Dark, Abstract Dramas

Monique Prieto’s new paintings are more like clouds than any of her previous works. In the same way that clouds sometimes assemble themselves in your imagination to form ships, camels or gigantic faces, the abstract shapes in her acrylics on canvas appear to depict elaborate scenes, uncannily dark dramas filled with more emotional turmoil and tortured ambivalence than are usually found in contemporary art, especially for an artist whose paintings have a reputation for being light and cheery.

The mood is set by the palette of Prieto’s eight works at Acme Gallery. Dominated by an impressive range of muted blues, the show’s serious tone is rounded out by rainy-day grays, earthy browns and midnight blacks. Accents from the other end of the spectrum steer clear of the exuberance that once animated the L.A. artist’s cartoon-inspired works, replacing its playfulness with the poignancy of bruised reds, injured pinks and grungy yellows.

Always able to make sparks fly along the lines where positive and negative space meet, Prieto juices up figure-ground relationships in her new works to give them the feel of high-speed collisions. More complex than before, the craggy contours of her monochrome shapes outline fractured gaps and splintered fissures that are as potent as any painted portion.

She also complicates the relationships among her wildly irregular forms. With more “legs,” “arms,” “tendrils” and “peninsulas” than previous shapes had, the new ones stretch themselves across unpainted backgrounds until they come near the edges of the canvas (which they never touch) or abut another indescribable shape (which they never overlap). Some lock together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Others grind against one another, like the gears of a car’s transmission when its clutch is let out too quickly. Still others recall such natural phenomena as an insect’s antennae delicately exploring its surroundings, or a root growing in the crack of a rock until it splits it in two.

Every square inch of Prieto’s variously scaled paintings feels as if it’s under pressure, compressed by the modern anxiety of trying to pack a day’s commitments and responsibilities into 24 short hours. The open-ended psychodramas she stages with whiplash efficiency in “Departure,” “Merciless” and “Blue Again” involve life-defining struggles between the individual and the group.

But the most powerful paintings, which are also the largest, give eloquent voice to the unseen torment that boils inside people whenever we want to do one thing but know we should do something else. Edgar Allan Poe called such irrepressibly self-destructive desires “the imp of the perverse,” a description that suits the inward spiraling violence implied by “Heedless” and “Cause and Effect.” Like all of the works in Prieto’s breakthrough exhibition, these surprisingly chilling paintings resonate with the troubling ambiguity that once fueled the fires of Surrealism.

Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Shall We Dance?: Alex Donis’ paintings of policemen dancing with gang members depict a world in which fear, disdain and hate have momentarily disappeared, giving way to joy, respect and happiness.

Things begin slowly in “Spider and Officer Johnson,” in which a beefy African American in baggy overalls and oversized T-shirt reaches out to a blond cop in a crisp blue LAPD uniform. The two stand stiffly against a frosty white background, as if awkwardly auditioning for a remake of “Saturday Night Fever.”

As Donis’ confidence in his skills as a draftsman increases, the fun picks up. Looser and more naturalistically rendered, the figures in “Scoob Dog and Officer Morales” grip one another’s wrists. The shirtless youth dips the policeman, who throws back his head, kicks out a leg, closes his eyes and smiles blissfully.

All of Donis’ 11 paintings on canvas and plexiglass follow this format, pairing officers of various ethnicities with a similarly mixed group of gangbangers. A 10-foot-long triptych catches three dancing duos in moments of abandon. “Deputy Davis and Smiles” shows the pair striking a classic pose, each holding one hand overhead as they waltz formally. “Officer Moreno and Joker” portrays the two men arching their backs in unison, grasping one another for balance as they groove to some funky beat. And “Sergeant Talamante and Trigger” reveals big dimples outlining the gleeful smiles of both, who thrust their hips and shake their booties as they bump and grind with delight.

Of course, all this is pure fantasy, and devotees of realism in the arts will say that such images do not accurately reflect historical reality. In other words, such things could never happen here.

That’s exactly what happened at the Watts Towers Arts Center, where Donis’ exhibition was shut down Sept. 20, three days after it opened as one of the events celebrating the towers’ restoration. Re-installed at Frumkin/Duval Gallery, where it’s accompanied by a soundtrack by Morgan Barnard and wall texts by Keith Antar Mason, it reveals a deep strand of hypocrisy running through L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Department, whose general manager, Margie Johnson Reese, ordered the original show closed.

The city agency has long promoted the idea that art heals, that it unites people from diverse communities and creates greater understanding among them. That seems to be the point of Donis’ Pop paintings. But, apparently, city officials are more interested in symbolic healing, in quick fixes and one-shot deals, than in the long-term work required for Donis’ vision to be realized.

There’s also a component of homophobia in the decision to shut down the show, which is about as titillating and sexually scandalous as an afternoon of televised football. Like beauty, homoeroticism is in the eye of the beholder, a decision best left to individuals. See the show and make up your own mind.

Frumkin/Duval Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through Jan. 12. Closed Mondays.

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That ‘70s Show: Brad Spence’s new paintings are a 1970s love fest. Resurrecting Photo-Realist depiction, air-brushed imagery, soft-core pornography and cocktail hour in the suburbs, his blurry yet incisive pictures take viewers back to another event with a ‘70s vintage: the moment the young artist was conceived.

Titled “As I Was Conceived,” his exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery consists of two series that turn the nostalgia on its ear. The first, featured in the main gallery, is a narrative cycle that begins with a couple gazing into one another’s eyes and ends with them having sex.

Despite the potentially X-rated subject matter, there’s something sweet about the scene. As painted by Spence, it unfolds slowly. Its languorous pace marks its distance from the slam-bang instantaneity of the present, when things happen so fast that even pronouncing all the syllables in “instantaneous gratification” seems to take too much time.

In the second gallery, a trio of smaller paintings depicts a table on which a lamp, an ashtray, a shrimp cocktail and a pair of highballs have been set. With great economy of means, they capture a moment when living the good life meant bringing some of the debonair atmosphere of swanky cocktail lounges into one’s bedroom.

All of Spence’s paintings are actually three paintings in one. After laying down a solid background in a palette that recalls ‘70s home decor, he airbrushes three nearly identical versions of the same image atop one another. As if he were a print-maker incapable of getting each color to register properly, he does not align the edges of his images. This makes the figures appear to be moving. It also suggests that you’re watching a movie whose projector is malfunctioning. Before video, such stuttering imagery occurred often with rented films, the largest number of which were porn.

One of the best things about Spence’s works is that they replace the Freudian fixation on the supposed trauma of the primal moment with a more mundane fantasy of what transpired at one’s conception. The people in his pictures are not his parents but anonymous actors whose images he found in old magazines.

If their physiques and demeanors take viewers back to an era before weight training and plastic surgery became the norm, Spence’s paintings deliver us to the world in which we now live, where tacky glamour and everyday embarrassment say more about our identities than do old-fashioned ideas about catching our parents in the act.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.