They’re a Dynamic Duo of Strikingly Different Sensibilities

Eric White and Joe Sorren--both currently featured at La Luz de Jesus Gallery--are excellent painters who flirt confidently with the parameters of realism, distorting figures and familiar objects to produce precise, surrealistic imagery. Despite the similarity of technique, however, their work is surprisingly different in substance.

Sorren’s paintings are Expressionistic and emotional. He works in muted, earthy tones, layering patches of color in smooth strokes but with a painterly sensibility that seems rooted in the work of Paul Cezanne and the Impressionists. The characters in his paintings, whether imaginary or historical (Margaret Bourke-White, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Degas), are soulful, with swollen heads and big expressive eyes. The faces, though often misshapen (Degas has only one eye and grotesquely bulging lips), all convey a unique personality. The gaze of each is soft and sad; each has a particular wisdom but seems, at the same time, curiously resigned.

White’s paintings, on the other hand, are rooted in photographic imagery, with icy, inorganic colors and virtuoso smooth textures. They are not Photorealist in the sense of being painstakingly mimetic; rather, they explore the formal qualities of photography itself, particularly its capacity for distortion.

One painting, rendered in the cool grays of 1950s television, features the bust of a woman whose face and hair are caught in blurred motion, as though with a slow shutter speed. Another features a man and a woman rendered in reversed tones, as though seen on a photographic negative. Perhaps as a result of their photographic leanings, they are strikingly cold paintings, devoid of emotion and charged with a sense of mechanized violence. Their disturbingly predatory undercurrent is primarily focused on the female figures, most of whom exude a rather grotesque air of seduction.

The dynamism that emerges from the pairing of these equally compelling bodies of work comes to a head in the one painting on which they collaborated: a perhaps nonsensical but visually curious work crowded with characters, each generally identifiable as progeny of one artist or the other, who look like a sullen band of new step-siblings.

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La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 978-7667, through Sept. 30.

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Our Inner Feral Child: Miranda Lichtenstein’s arresting new photographs, on view at Goldman Tevis Gallery in Chinatown, are based on fictitious and semi-fictitious accounts, from various cultures and eras, of children who have been raised by animals in the wild. Rather than retell the stories in any narrative sense, however, these images re-create, in visual terms, the psychological and emotional world that such children might have occupied.

Considering that one of the primary characteristics of this world would be the absence of language, it is to Lichtenstein’s credit as a visual storyteller that the photographs are difficult to describe in words. They’re slippery images that convey little objective information and evade a rational grasp.

Most involve plants and animals, but it is unclear which are genuine and which are fake. Most seem to take place in nature, but in a version of it that seems neither real nor entirely contrived. Depth is compacted and space distorted with shadow. It is almost as though Lichtenstein were photographing the inside of a child’s imagination and had no need to distinguish between fantasy and actuality, tangible and intangible things.

To really experience the images, it thus seems necessary to surrender one’s ability to explain them and let them simply make sense on an intuitive level.

Aside from one 10-by-12 foot screen, which features an amateurish photographic collage of familiar animals, most of the prints are average-sized and provide intimate glimpses of this imaginary world, all at relatively close range: through veils of twigs and branches, up to boughs of colorful leaves, into mossy enclaves and the nests of regal white birds.

These are lush and mysterious pictures, with delicious color and rich shadows. Lichtenstein’s wonderful way with black, a tone that’s rarely used so gracefully in color photography, accentuates the dream-like nature of the world she creates.

The details of the stories that form the core of this series are ultimately not so important because one suspects that the real subject in the work is the feral child lurking within each viewer, beyond the reach of language and rational thought. It is to this child that Lichtenstein speaks.

Goldman Tevis Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through Oct. 6. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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Delightfully Ordinary: If the use of everyday household materials in the making of art was once considered innovative, even political, today it all too often seems a lazy excuse to avoid the expense and technical demands of fine art materials. Rarely do we encounter a contemporary artist clearly committed to addressing the demands of common objects.

Tom Friedman is one such artist. Tara Donovan is another. Donovan understands ordinary materials on their own terms and for their own sake. The three sculptures she has installed at Ace Gallery are composed of only one material each, and it is difficult to imagine any of those materials--which are about as banal as they come--presented in a more naturally beautiful way.

The most technically remarkable is a roughly 4-by-4 foot freestanding cube made from more than 3 million toothpicks. The toothpicks are pointed every which way, as though poured directly into a glass mold, but held together entirely by the forces of friction and gravity. A delicate sort of anxiety hovers around this gorgeous piece, urging stillness and slow movements.

Another work involves thousands of small, roundish, overlapping pools of Elmer’s glue, spilled directly on the floor to create a flat, sprawling, cloud-like form that is surprisingly elegant in its simplicity. The last work is similar in shape to the glue piece but made from floppy, oversized rolls of adding machine tape, each several feet in diameter. The subtle colors (pinks and whites) and sweeping lines formed by the rolls, which nestle and overlap on the ground like a large family of sleeping sea lions, are truly lovely.

Each of these sculptures is an expression of pure, refined, visual delight that is all the more compelling for the banality of its material.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 935-4411, through September. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Images of War: Although photography has been an important aspect of every U.S. military effort since the Civil War, the photographs of World War II have a distinctive and--to many raised in the wake of the Vietnam War--unsettling resonance: starched, patriotic, by turns cheerful and ominous, and filled with holes where the less savory or flattering images of war should have been.

A sizable sampling of such photographs--produced by the military on Speed Graphic cameras manufactured specifically for the war--is on view at Stephen Cohen Gallery. The most interesting feature of the exhibition, which was developed with Folmer Graflex, the company that produced the military cameras, is that it is composed almost entirely of vintage prints still affixed to their original yellowing mounts and embossed with propagandistic captions. Designed to assure war bond investors that their money was well-spent, the images speak of a hardy, buoyant fighting force.

“The Blood You Gave ... “ (all works circa 1944) features three uniformed soldiers tending to the IV of a shirtless comrade. “Americans Wounded Somewhere in Australia” depicts six men lying on stretchers in a compact tent, lost in boredom and reverie. “Jap Prisoners, Tarawa”--one of the most disturbing--depicts hunched prisoners scuttling between lines of American soldiers through a field of dirt and barbed wire.

Some are more lighthearted. “Nine Boys With Bombs” features a row of shirtless young men parading across the top of a hill with bombs slung over their shoulders.

Others focus on technical and industrial issues. One of the most visually interesting, “Bomber Noses,” depicts women polishing rows of enormous glass cones, which reflect the lights of the factory in thousands of scattered points.

This is a compelling and thoughtfully organized show. Although far from critical (or even political) in its presentation, it leaves space for questions as well as patriotism.

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Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-5525, through Oct. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.