Wells’ Pop Paintings Leave Room for the Viewer’s Imagination

Like flies to flypaper, words stick to some paintings. If you’re a critic (and who isn’t?), it’s a pleasure to talk about such works. Their conceptual underpinnings invite lengthy discourse, making viewers feel loquacious and sophisticated.

Other paintings do the opposite. As if made of Teflon, their surfaces give words no purchase. No matter how many sentences are thrown at them, they slide off without leaving a trace. Such works make critics feel uncomfortable, primarily because they compel us to shut up.

Lynton Wells is a Pop virtuoso whose canvases fall into the latter category. At Post Gallery, his second solo show in Los Angeles (his first was 25 years ago) makes a virtue of silence. Demonstrating that some paintings are infinitely more satisfying than anything that can be said about them, the 60-year-old New Yorker transforms muteness into a celebration of unself-conscious engagement.

Described in words, Wells’ images sound as if they’re too silly to be taken seriously. One depicts a cartoon frog that arches its back and uses its long tongue to nab a gravity-defying crown. A second shows a horned serpent whose polka-dotted body forms a series of figure-eights that spiral back to a cluster of dollar signs. A third portrays a luminous carp trying its hand at fly fishing, its tangled line ablaze with otherworldly light.

In others, a trio of bonsai, plugged into a wall socket, hover like helicopters on leashes; the word “sex” is spelled out like a fiery explosion; and three mischievous demons tiptoe across the top of a gigantic question mark. Like storybook illustrations that appeal to kids long before words make sense to them, Wells’ fanciful images do not need narratives to get your eyes racing around the myriad curlicues and your head spinning with the richness of the experience.

All of his durably elegant paintings are made of layers of raw pigment and resin that have been vigorously rubbed into the weave of the canvas and repeatedly sanded smooth with an abrasive. Like oversize tattoos, their graphic patterns and ornamental flourishes are more fun to marvel at than to analyze dispassionately. Uninterested in rational explanation or long-winded explication, Wells’ mute yet eloquent paintings make room for the imagination, a resource that often gets lost amid today’s cacophony of instantaneous communication.

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, Downtown L.A., (213) 622-8580, through May 19. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

Buzzing Force Fields: The scale of the shapes in Andy Collins’ abstract paintings is so ambiguous that it makes you feel as if you’re peering into a bowl of melting sorbet and staring at a lightning storm on the horizon. So hot they’re cool, the young painter’s delicately tinted images at Marc Foxx Gallery are at once electrifying and soothing, a potent combination that keeps one coming back for more--even when you think you’ve seen everything.

Nothing fits together neatly in any of Collins’ nearly square canvases. Most flirt with bilateral symmetry, presenting a network of wavering lines, which would form the contours of anorexic Rorschach blots if the right side of any image ever got it together to mirror its left.

Likewise, the attractive pastels that fill the craggy spaces between these dark brown and deep purple lines sometimes follow their contours and at other times spill out of their boundaries. While many of Collins’ pinks, blues, lavenders, creams and faded shades of all sorts of melons form flat expanses of solid color, a good number feature subtle tonal gradations, which often climax in dazzling white highlights.

Their sexiness is palpable yet never explicit, seductive rather than point-blank. It recalls what it’s like to catch a glimpse of bare skin between a blouse and a skirt, or in the gap formed by a plunging neckline.

It isn’t surprising to learn that Collins bases his compositions on fashion-magazine layouts. But rather than focusing on gorgeous bodies and beautiful garments, his works zero in on the seemingly empty areas between arms, legs and bodies. They transform negative space into force fields abuzz with visual energy.

They also make odd bedfellows of Georgia O’Keeffe’s bland abstractions and Jack Goldstein’s sci-fi skyscapes. Calling to mind these otherwise unrelated precedents without referring to them directly, Collins’ suavely accomplished paintings go a long way to fuse the perceptual refinements of Light and Space art with the spunky accessibility of Pop. It’s a heady and pleasurable mix.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through May 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Where Fantasy and Reality Meet: At Off Main Gallery, 45 small drawings by Ken Price show a rarely seen side of the veteran Los Angeles sculptor, whose carved and molded works rank among the best being made today. Like his groundbreaking ceramic abstractions, which combine the goofiness of cartoons, the sparkle of polished hot rods and the true-to-life detail of classic sculptures, Price’s works on paper draw on a variety of sources. Old-fashioned comic strips figure prominently in his page-size seascapes, but so do Japanese woodblock prints, Mexican Day of the Dead posters and American painting--from the high-flying drama of home-grown abstraction to the happy dabbling of weekend hobbyists.

Many of Price’s best drawings depict nothing but sea and sky. Dividing the page into three vertical layers, he often uses different materials in each. In the foreground, colored pencil gives a frothy, chalky feel to the bubbly surf that washes up on the beach. In the middle ground, fine-tipped marking pens precisely define the sweep and curl of big waves, with flicks of thick acrylic giving substance to the whitecaps. In the background, translucent puddles of runny watercolors give vaporous form to the sky, across which dense, rain-filled clouds lumber and wispy pretty ones drift.

Tiny nude women sometimes surf Price’s waves. In a few images, they walk along the shore in front of a factory’s silhouetted smokestacks. In the funniest ones, they dance in circles around giant versions of the artist’s tabletop sculptures.

Price’s biomorphic sculptures star in about a third of the drawings, which allow him to play with scale more freely than his 3-D pieces do. Some slither over the landscape like rivers of molten lava. Others protrude from the sea like enormous periscopes or perch on offshore rocks like campy renditions of the Loch Ness monster. Still others tower over houses like animated aliens, or, like religious apparitions, traverse the glassy surfaces of lagoons.

Fantasy and reality intermingle in all of Price’s playful pictures. Putting the crisp lines and unsentimental outlook of Pop art to good use, his cool drawings pay homage to picture-perfect moments, when the little pleasures provided by a day at the beach are worth their weight in gold.

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* Off Main Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-0211, through July. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.