History, and Remembering It

In Arnold Mesches’ paintings, vigorous brushwork embodies turmoil. On the one hand it describes the tumult of what’s depicted--the whirling uproar of a Coney Island carnival ride, for example, or the tangled patterns of global migration undertaken by Eastern Europeans in the 20th century. On the other hand the chaotic jumble of individual human memory is denoted. Between the two, our sense of history accumulates.

At the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, “Echoes: A Century Survey” brings together 16 large paintings, 59 smaller ones on canvas or paper and eight drawings. It’s a pared-down version of a show organized in 2000 by the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland.

The paintings date from the late 1990s, and their tangle of social history and personal recollection shows the 79-year-old artist layering the imminent turn of one century onto the one that preceded it. Born in the Bronx, Mesches was the son of an immigrant to New York’s Lower East Side, who is remembered in a large painting. It shows a dapper, well-dressed man with his arm around a boy in knickers, as if protecting him from the darkly aggressive forest in which they stand. A separate portrait of the artist’s mother as an old woman--painted in layered tonalities of blue--renders her as an elusive, unknowable yet omnipresent apparition.

Rows of small paintings, mostly black and white and shown in heavy frames, reproduce family snapshots--weddings, vacations, outings, etc. The odd practice of recording old photographs in paint in actual size has a peculiar effect: As labored meditations on an elusive past, they become reminders of mortality. This is painting as memento mori.

Several works map the routes of European immigrants, pushed by war or other hardship. This diaspora is interwoven with Hollywood pinups, fragments of tenement life and Coney Island scenes. Most of the map paintings are on un-stretched canvas, hung from grommets. They have the look of campaign charts salvaged from the battlefield.

The show’s most compelling picture brings all these elements together. Shrouded in a sickly, aqueous green light--it looks like an underwater realm--”Anomie 2001: Coney” (1997) is at once playful and horrific, a fun-house view of the world. Merry-go-round horses stampede. A Buck Rogers-style rocket ship is on the launch pad, aimed at a World War II fighter plane. D-Day parachutes merge with a raucous carnival ride. And the scene is dominated by a gigantic carnival Cyclops, whose one-eyed view is both barbarous and obsolete.

Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester, (310) 665-6909, through Saturday.

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Illuminated Manuscripts of Religious, Classic Texts

Illuminated manuscripts have been called medieval comic books, and not without reason. The narrative interdependence between written word and painted picture is key.

At Roth Horowitz Ferrini & Biondi, a rare and luxurious exhibition of medieval and Renaissance manuscript illuminations also shows some limitations of the analogy. You don’t need to read Latin to be moved by a rendition (tucked inside a fat letter N) of the reunion of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate. Elsewhere, recognizing that intricately decorated borders honor the experience of reading is separate from specific details of the religious or classical text that has been lavishly adorned.

The show includes 26 manuscripts--Bibles, Psalters, books of hours, epic poetry, etc.--as well as 10 cuttings, decorated initials, full-page miniatures and other sheets. They range in date from the 12th century to the early 16th century, and most are German, French, Flemish or Italian.

One that isn’t is historically significant: an English-manuscript Bible (circa 1410) that once belonged to Richard Hunne, a London merchant famously accused of heresy and mysteriously found dead in the bishop’s prison at St. Paul’s Cathedral. (The church alleged the hanging was a suicide, born of guilt; his friends cried murder.) A Wycliff Bible, which predates King James, it’s the first English translation of the New Testament from Latin.

Others are of more visual interest. An annunciation in a Northern European book of hours (circa 1470) gives the angel’s visit to the Virgin Mary all the pomp and circumstance of a courtly coronation--thus neatly anticipating her future veneration as queen of heaven. Slightly drawn exotic animals and mythological creatures give a Psalter (circa 1330) an aura of fantastic whimsy, which makes the book’s sacred songs of praise playful and otherworldly. And in a charming French miniature, which is the example most reminiscent of a modern comic book, the gesticulating narrator of a romance by Boccaccio describes the action in a battle scene going on behind him.

Roth Horowitz Ferrini & Biondi, 8446 Melrose Place, West Hollywood, (323) 782-4950, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays.

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Surface and Color in Abstract Group Show

Surface and color are the dual focus in a group show of new abstract paintings by 11 artists at Angles Gallery. “Prima Facie,” as the show is titled, offers these structural elements as visual evidence.

A grid is the signature motif of rational order for Modernist abstraction, and it turns up in very different works by Simone Adels, Steven Charles, Alexis Harding and Susanna Maing. Here, though, the grid appears variously weather-beaten, abraded, shredded, twisted or otherwise mauled. Purist it’s not.

Imagery does crop up on occasion, but mostly in an allusive way. Crimson hourglass shapes on a jet-black ground by Linda Stark might be close-ups of black widow spiders. Landscape seems submerged beneath Graeme Todd’s smoggy surface, where wispy lines and winsome spots of confetti-like paint cavort. A peeping Tom’s-eye view of a suburban patio comes in and out of sight from the vertical black striations in Sarah Beddington’s rather gimmicky work.

Patricia Moisan and Kathleen Kucka split the difference between allusive imagery and the grid in two variations on white paintings. Moisan’s fuzzy picture recalls a crumpled length of fabric, patterned with tiny clouds or profile heads. Kucka lines up maze-like patterns that recall cross sections of bone or cranial matter.

Linda Besemer and Robert Greene offer the most complex works, both using stripe motifs. Besemer’s monumental skin of acrylic color, nearly 10 feet tall, hangs from the wall and lies in folds on the floor, somewhat like a Robert Morris felt sculpture; their physicality and weight give them shape. Besemer’s stripe painting is all paint, however, without any structural support like canvas or board. Color is offered as a startlingly tangible material.

Greene paints on thin, square panels of aluminum, which makes the painting almost flush with the wall. Less theatrical and more obsessive than Besemer, the vertical strokes of oil color are broken up into narrow horizontal bands. (He appears to paint over strips of masking tape.) The result is a strange visual weave. Greene’s paintings are like sensuous microchips. The warp and weft of color together claims an ancestry in woven canvas, but here it is transformed into a subtle but opulent high-tech skin.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Sept. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Combining Art, Music and Video

“Proposal for ‘The Side of the Mountain’ ” is a kind of video-sketch for an opera. In the main room at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, artist Simon Leung and composer Michael Webster have built a small room where the four-channel video can be watched from bleacher seats suggestive of an abstract hillside.

One suspended monitor looks east toward the downtown L.A. skyline at twilight. Another looks west toward the familiar profile of Griffith Observatory. Through the course of the opera, night falls.

The third (and largest) monitor locates the main action between the two, inside the park, where an anonymous sexual encounter between a young man (tenor Rodell Aure Rosel) and a middle-aged man (baritone Paul Cummings) unfolds in a tentative, awkward dance. On a fourth monitor tucked over in the corner, a third man (countertenor Jason Snyder) searches in the park for his lost dog, fearful that coyotes might have gotten him.

The tension between natural freedoms and cultural boundaries is structurally described by the libretto--in the setting of an urban park, in the sexual identity of the central characters, even in the pairing of tamed and wild canines--and it’s a familiar anxiety not without dramatic possibilities. But that tension is not embodied in the mostly stilted, sometimes haphazard visual imagery, nor in the ponderous music and its awkward lyrics. The video installation explains what the situation is, but we’re left without much stake in the experience.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through Aug. 30. Closed Mondays.