Shelton’s ‘Corporate Men’ Are Devoid of Props of Power

So ubiquitous is the presence of corporate power today that it is easy to think of the corporation in completely disembodied terms: as a series of product logos, Nasdaq figures and earnings statistics rather than part of an actual, physical industry. Led by a few interchangeable CEOs and fueled by the invisible labor of indistinguishable minions, these entities are defined by a sort of bodiless anonymity that has haunted the American conscience since long before Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

Richard Shelton’s new series of watercolor paintings, “Corporate Men,” at Frumkin/Duval Gallery addresses this character of corporate culture by pulling the suited capitalists out of the crowd and suspending them in an eerily nondescript void. Each of these 16 paintings depicts a single male figure in business attire, moving either toward or away from the viewer and frozen mid-stride, as though captured in a photograph. Each figure has the air of one who has been plucked unknowingly from a crowd, clearly not aware of being observed.

While the figures are rendered in a Realist style, each is portrayed against a black backdrop conveyed in quick, rough strokes and establishing only the most rudimentary degree of perspective space.

This positioning pointedly strips the figures of anything that might suggest either power or powerlessness within the corporate structure. We don’t know whether we are looking at billionaire CEOs or anonymous paper-pushers. They are simply men--some young, some old, some lean, some frumpy.

There’s a tangible degree of cruelty to Shelton’s rendering of these men. For one thing, their pictorial decontextualization calls into question the professional neutrality of their suits. They look like men in rather silly costumes.

More importantly, however, Shelton strips them unceremoniously of their props of power--their mahogany desks, laptops, cars, employees, wives--and forces them to confront an existential void of blackness that Shelton has not even bothered to paint very well. In so doing, he taps into a common (if not universal) fear of futility and suggests we take a deeper look at the shadows that lurk beyond our material world.

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Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1850, through March 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Moving Pictures: The picture taken out the window of a moving car is probably one of the most common photographic cliches in existence. It is also one of the most patently disappointing. However spectacular the landscape, however thrilling the sensation of driving, however far you lean out the window, the resulting snapshot is not likely to capture the fervor of the moment because the vantage point is always fixed in the same awkward position.

It’s difficult to say whether the commonness--and common failure--of this format helps or hurts Brian Moss’ photographs, which are all taken from moving cars. On one hand, doing something that nearly every non-artist has experience doing makes his work all the more susceptible to the “my kid could do that” brand of criticism--not necessarily a bad thing, but generally a risk worth avoiding. On the other hand, there is poetry hidden within the persistent banality of the format--in the giddy experience of motion, wind and landscape--that might be revealed through an intelligent manipulation of that format.

Ultimately, Moss’ photographs, on view at Craig Krull Gallery, rise to the latter challenge. Moss takes the photographs randomly and probably in large quantities, then identifies their value as individual images once they are developed, shifting the act of composition from the camera to the proof sheet.

The result is a modest selection of color images that are both spontaneous and elegantly refined. In the pictures, Moss transforms familiar terrain--the streets of Los Angeles--into an understated meditation on issues of chance, motion and space. He is less concerned with the objects in the landscape than the nature of the expanse that surrounds them.

Thus, some of the best images are taken up almost entirely by the chalky Southern Californian sky, with only the edge of a building, a blurry guardrail or a blank billboard in a lower corner of the image. In separating these sorts of eloquent details from the profuse clutter of our urban landscape, Moss reconfigures banality into poetry.

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Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through April 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Colorful Gestures: Wassily Kandinsky, in his seminal book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” defines blue as a heavenly color--a color signifying contemplation and transcendence, in which “the power of profound meaning is found.” Yellow, on the other hand, is defined as an earthy color that lacks “profound meaning” but instead is associated with “with madness, with violent raving lunacy.”

Suzan Woodruff, who quotes Kandinsky in her artist’s statement, has taken this slice of the Modernist guru’s color theory to heart. Her elegant abstract paintings, on view at William Turner Gallery, explore the complicated and potentially profound relationship between yellow and blue by playing them against each other in loose, watery compositions.

Because blue, the coolest of the colors, has the quality of receding from the viewer while yellow, the warmest, has the quality of advancing, the relationship between them when paired exclusively is a poetic one: a delicate balance of opposing tensions. Woodruff handles this balance with a generally wise and unassuming delicacy that leaves room for the sort of psychological associations Kandinsky suggests.

Woodruff’s approach is clearly instinctual and emotional rather than mathematical. The paintings bear more relation to the organic processes of nature than the formal machinations of color theory, despite their self-consciously limited palette. With the exception of a few torn paper collages, which are somewhat muddier and less satisfying than the rest of the work, each of the compositions is oriented around a central circular or triangular form, and several are stamped with the black outline of a butterfly.

Although, like the colors, these are essentialist symbols, prone to simplification or cliche, Woodruff invests them with a genuine and convincing reverence. As a result, each of these lovely paintings transforms what might be simply a stylistic experiment into a concrete gesture of faith.

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William Turner Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399, through April 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Five With Promise: Sandroni Rey Gallery’s current exhibition of new work by five of its regular artists has the air of an impromptu dinner party that, by whatever collusion of benevolent celestial forces, becomes an unexpected treat for everyone involved. The guests all seem to get along and the works, while significantly varied in medium and subject matter, mingle happily. Although the exhibition was not conceived with an overarching theme in mind, its tasteful juxtaposition of works elicits some pleasant surprises.

In two free-standing sculptures and a wall piece, the artist team Castaneda/Reiman uses common construction materials such as plywood, drywall, carpet padding and plastic skylights to create surprisingly refined works reminiscent of Pacific Coast landscapes, with watery shades of blue and green and crisp horizontal lines.

Two sculptures by Lynn Aldrich also use common materials but add a decidedly more festive spin. One is a table made from stacked sheets of colorful corrugated plastic and the other is a behind-the-scenes apparatus that periodically spews confetti-like silver stars from a small hole in the wall.

Photographs by John Pearson and Soo Kim offer a nice textural balance to the sculptural works, while also inadvertently echoing several of their themes, such as landscape and furniture. A subtly hilarious work by Pearson combines several photographs of armchairs and couches abandoned on different city curbs; each is lying on its side but photographed as though it were upright, which tweaks the rest of the photograph’s world by 45 or 90 degrees and creates a delicious sort of pictorial confusion. In a lovely series of city and landscape photographs, Soo Kim presents a refined study in color--yellow and green particularly--that instills the exhibition with a mellow tone.

In all, the exhibition is a pleasant, late-winter treat--a casual showcase for good work that will probably keep the viewer watching for these artists in the future.

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Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through April 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.