Texture Upon Texture in Pittman’s Paintings

At Regen Projects, 17 poster-size paintings on paper by Lari Pittman fill the gallery to overflowing with a masterfully designed riot of color, shape, line and texture. There’s no escape from these sizzling pictures of modern men, caught up in maelstroms of socially engineered emotions.

Each piece is a densely interwoven web that features a stylish urbanite’s stylized head. Usually rendered in the manner of a high-end comic book, their chiseled faces are occasionally accented by tasteful tertiary colors. Pittman’s impeccably coiffed cast includes a farm boy, a truck driver and a tough guy on safari, among a dozen others, all of whose manicured youthfulness suggests that they’re actors or waiters or both. Their handsome heads pop out from the background because they’re black-and-white and as flat as paper dolls.

In contrast, the brightly colored and richly textured surroundings form overwrought collages cluttered with household objects, abstract patterns and giant insects, as well as antique beakers, pipettes and gas lines, which appear to be rigged for mysterious experiments. Imagine if Frank O. Gehry collaborated with a group of nutty Russian Constructivists to build a set of shelves around a couple windows on a large wall. This gives you an idea of the competing force fields--jarring angles and swooping curves--that provide Pittman’s dynamic compositions with their structural logic.

Then imagine that the shelves are in the attic of a fabric and wallpaper designer who has stored four or five decades’ worth of samples there. This gives you a feeling for the wealth of material detail that accumulates in these works, whose love for fine things is both catholic and palpable.

Illusionistic space opens up, showing various maritime scenes. Otherwise, irregularly shaped compartments present close-ups of organic and man-made objects. Each of Pittman’s resplendent images is also an impressive compendium of painterly techniques--brushing, rolling, spraying, dripping, stamping and dappling.

But the most important dramas are the ones that play out on this side of the picture-plane. No matter where you stand, Pittman’s gregarious art includes you in its open-ended narratives.

In the past, his brash, billboard-scaled images bowled you over. In contrast, his new, more intimately scaled works are much sneakier in the way they address viewers.

The title of each is “Optimal setting for atmospheric conditions that can induce ------------ in the male.” The blanks are filled by such emotional states as rapture, melancholia, distraction, onanism and euphoria, among 12 others whose tenor has a 19th century ring to it.

Gracious in their unintrusive formality, these mature works do not claim to induce anything in viewers. Instead, they simply present situations in which such things are said to transpire. This gives viewers the option to stand back and analyze others who appear to be caught up in life’s tumult. Eventually, such detached contemplation wears thin, and even standoffish viewers start testing their own experiences against what takes place in the pictures. That’s when Pittman’s experimental art gets really interesting and impossible to control.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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At Play: Play-school Futurism may not sound serious enough to be the name of an art movement anyone would want to be part of. But it goes a long way in describing some of the most promising abstract painting being made today.

Cartoons and coloring books rank among the most influential sources of the seven shamelessly playful works in Bart Exposito’s solo debut at Acuna-Hansen Gallery. In these acrylics on canvas, black outlines and flat expanses of solid color form goofy, diagrammatic pictures, many of which appear to be the offspring of spaceships and school buses. Others look as if they’re the love-children of mobile homes and TV consoles from the early 1960s, when satellites and lunar landings promised their own far-out brand of adventure, danger and romance.

The recent history of painting also takes shape in Exposito’s crisp images. Fun and intelligence go hand in glove.

The earliest untitled work (from 1999) consists of four rectangular canvases, all of different dimensions and proportions. Two hang flush with the wall. Two others hang atop these, overlapping most, but not all, of the first ones.

On each stark-white panel, Exposito has painted a shape that resembles a fragment of a letter of the alphabet: a tightly cropped close-up of an arch, line or loop. The tail of a Q-shaped fragment reaches to within an inch of the floor, literally linking the abstract image to the space around it. Measuring nearly 7 by 6 feet, this snuggly abutted cluster resembles a billboard that has suffered a nervous breakdown--and been put back together too hastily to be as good as new.

The next two works are multi-part paintings with no overlapping panels. Rather than reenacting painting’s breakdown and eventual transformation into installation art, they emphasize its links to furniture.

The squeaky-clean surfaces, modular structures and sophisticated palettes of the remaining four images bespeak art’s cross-fertilization with design. The two small ones depict imaginary vehicles, loopy capsules that, figuratively speaking, transport viewers out of this world. The two larger, less representational ones are the best.

Of these, one stands on the floor perpendicular to a wall. It would look even better if it were hung in the conventional manner, like the one over the sofa in the rear office. In both, references to such everyday things as goldfish, laptops, street signs and speech bubbles swirl around one another without settling into clear-cut narratives.

Taking a lesson or two from John Wesley, Carl Ostendarp and Monique Prieto, Exposito’s paintings demonstrate that cartoons are not just for kids anymore. Elegance is all the more potent when it appears unexpectedly.

* Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Feb. 24. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

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Upwardly Mobile: Works of art appear on the walls of tract houses and trailer homes far less often than these middle- and lower-middle-class subjects appear in contemporary paintings. That’s because art doesn’t trickle down from the top of the economic pyramid, running dry as it disperses across the lowest levels. On the contrary, it gets sucked upward, feeding the appetites of collectors who can’t find its peculiar pleasures anywhere else.

Upward mobility (and its downwardly spiraling opposite) take stark shape in the five paintings in Liam Jones’ solo debut. At Post Gallery, the young artist’s acrylics on panel depict the American dream of home ownership as something both flimsy and intractable, an illusion that has less to do with the real world than with the fantasies that fuel our attachment to it.

A sense of dislocation permeates all of Jones’ images. In one, a monstrous stone fountain in the foreground dwarfs four houses in the background. The raw wood of their frames, still under construction, looks naked and vulnerable, incapable of living up to the pomp and ceremony of the preposterous fountain.

In another nearly symmetrical image, three trailer homes form an unceremonious courtyard in which a cluster of cypresses has been transplanted. The whites, grays and beiges of the trailers’ metal skins reflect the midday sun, which flattens everything except the deep-green trees and their black shadows. The airless painting is claustrophobic and suffocating.

Jones’ pictures disturb because their fastidiously rendered details make them less rather than more realistic. It’s as if the labor that goes into their production works at cross-purposes with the illusions they’re meant to live up to.

Every blade of grass, cypress branch, cinder-block and plywood sheet has been so fussed over that the urban landscapes they form have the presence of still lifes. They’re artificial setups over which someone else has godlike control.

In the end, Jones’ paintings are not about the dream of simply owning a home but the desire to own a home that’s bigger and better than whatever you have. Built-in, the nightmare does not disappear at sunrise.

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 622-8580, through Feb. 24. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The fiery intensity that smoldered in the smaller, more wispy paintings in Tam Van Tran’s previous exhibition flares up to burn even more brightly in his second solo show. Sometimes his cool compositions appear to ignite a canopy of fireworks in a smoke-choked night sky. At other times, the optical electricity is as faint as the twinkling of a star so far away that it burns out long before its light reaches us.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the young painter’s two large works provide the strongest links to his earlier canvases and panels, whose map-like armatures also appeared to float in front of perfectly smooth surfaces that seem to recede into deep space. A faint yellow glow lingers at the bottom edges of “Slow Burn” and “Lo-Tech Frequency,” suggesting that the sun has just set and a long, cold night in outer space lies ahead.

From the top edges, Tran has suspended thousands of fine orange lines, whose superimposed grids recall the streets on city maps. These lacy networks, hanging like Baroque chandeliers, resemble floating cities or impossibly vast space stations.

Their scale is ambiguous, shifting eloquently from the intergalactic to the subatomic. In either case, they provide geometric frameworks for a variety of painterly incidents. Tran clusters together solid blocks and spheres of bright color to form structures at once organic and techno.

The three small canvases present enlarged close-ups of such jampacked sections. Painted with iridescent pigments, “Reciting Chlorophyll,” “Mineral Spirit” and “Telepathic Turkey” embody the unnatural glow emitted by video and computer monitors. At the same time, their linear compositions outline the contours of the circuitry inside these machines. Flipping back and forth between at least two worlds, Tran’s elusive paintings are as difficult to pin down as words that get stuck on the tip of your tongue.

* Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-2117, through March 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.