Placid landscapes? Not in this world

A landscape painting by Stephen Hannock seems to be less a record of the place represented in the picture than it is the creation of a place on the canvas. Hannock starts with what the mind already knows of the world -- a famous tip from Jasper Johns -- and his work builds on those abstractions. At Michael Kohn Gallery, 10 recent paintings and an idiosyncratic installation by the New York artist meld realist style with conceptual ideas.

The watery loop in “Morning Field With Winding River” recalls the famous Oxbow in the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts, but it doesn’t look like the actual site or the 19th century paintings of it by such Hudson River landscapists as Thomas Cole. Rather than suggesting the difficult but optimistic promise of a new day, the sunrise mists over the water look toxic -- an irradiated violet-blue haze rising toward an inferno of red and orange sky. A peculiar symmetry to Hannock’s wide, brushy view lends a sense of Rorschach blot to the scene, as if it were both an accidental image and an emotionally and intellectually evocative one.

J.M.W. Turner lurks behind “Emerald Nocturne With River Rockets,” with its Thames-ian view of explosions on a bridge seen across dark water. Yet Turner’s swirling spontaneity is undercut by Hannock’s rockets and their watery reflections.

At the top of the darkly dramatic picture, sparks fall in a necklace-like pattern, as if from carefully wrought fireworks at a celebration. Meanwhile the bridge is a billowing conflagration, more disaster area than saturnalia. A matching pair of white rocket trails frames the scene, but they frame it in the mind as well: Their suggestive patterns recall the inkblot drawings of Bay Area artist Bruce Conner.

The surfaces of Hannock’s paintings are also strange. Described as being made from “polished oil,” they are built up through a process of painting and sanding in sequential layers. The result is a hard, shiny plane that provides sleek visual depth and reflectiveness, while “unpolished” accents daubed in oil create a tactile relief on the surface. The paintings appear tooled, a mix of hand craft and machine.

A clue to Hannock’s method is found in one of the smallest pictures: a smoky, atmospheric, golden glow that spreads across a little horizontal field. Emerging from the center of the colored mist is the artist’s machine-printed name and address, while a postal mark floats into view at the upper right. Painting a landscape on a business envelope sends a message about personal correspondence, while a subtle diarist element is revealed.

That subtlety goes out the window in the wall-size installation of scribbled notes, snapshots, clippings and assorted collages, which offer a lament for the loss of two deceased friends (fellow artists Fran and Gregory Gillespie). Heartfelt but grandiloquent, it’s the one false note in an otherwise engaging show.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., (323) 658-8088, through Dec. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The mundane turns strange

Catherine Murphy is ready for her close-up, and a daunting prospect it is. In six oil paintings and two drawings at her solo debut in Los Angeles, the Poughkeepsie, N.Y.-based artist, 56, zooms in on worldly details that grow wondrously strange when intimately examined.

A painter’s palette on a piece of cardboard, a scrap of notebook paper, the pockets on a smock -- each mundane fragment becomes a landscape of worried-over experience when scrutinized so closely. The notebook page records anxieties about starting a new painting, and the distress becomes monumental when writ so large. (The canvas is 4 feet tall.) Yet it’s also resolved by the simple fact of the painting’s finished existence, where the ruled lines and the cursive script reenact art’s battle between conscious thought and intuition.

The lush bodice of a green dress, ornamented with a brooch of golden ribbon, begins to look like an alien planet on which a landing craft has just set down. Feet shrouded in black stockings, standing on a tiled bathroom floor, seem mournful and forlorn. A hand held up before a garden view, as if to block a camera’s lens, becomes translucent in the summer sun, a web of veins beneath skin that’s tangled with surface wrinkles.

These paintings are unthinkable without the cropping and enlargements familiar from photography. But Photo-Realist they are not. Murphy seems uninterested in camera vision per se, employing it instead as a useful tool that is little different from her cardboard palette. Self-scrutiny is her gambit, and her exceptional painterly skill pulls us along for the eye-opening ride.

In “Cathy,” her name is written on a steamed-up window, through which the barren limbs of wintry woods can be seen. So much of the landscape has been painted out to create the fog where her name is written that the canvas becomes a dizzying perceptual essay in the dialogue between being and nothingness.

The one direct self-portrait in this exceptional body of work shows the artist staring grimly ahead, as if seen through a sheet of glass on which an oval, a rectangle and a triangle have been painted. (They’re the color of dried blood.) Her face is framed by the rectangle, which vertically mimics the horizontal rectangle of the canvas that also frames the portrait. The oval, rectangle and triangle suggest the common descriptions of possible shapes for a human face. Here, the determined face of this artist virtually defies a viewer to identify her as being the least bit common.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through Dec. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Piecing together a green ‘Manifesto’

Earlier explorations of grids and cyber-maps are largely gone from five of the six new paintings by Tam Van Tran at Suzanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects. What remains is the prior sense of uncharted depths of information lying just below the surface. These works lodge themselves between a universe too big to see and a microcosm too small to perceive. Those conflicting realms are drawn together into uneasy alliance.

Collectively titled “Beetle Manifesto,” most of the paintings are made on strips of paper that have been run through a crimping device and then sutured together with thousands of staples. The strips are randomly painted with brushy, emerald green pigment, which has been mixed with chlorophyll and spirulina, a protein-rich micro-algae that is sometimes called a super-food.

The agglomeration of colored paper strips yields the look of an evergreen forest seen up close. Meanwhile, the green brush marks on crimped, corrugated paper offer a visual echo of the coiled shape of the microscopic algae. Punched holes animate the lumpy surface with tracks and trails, as if unseen insects had been munching on the paper.

The stapled sutures lend an aura of urgent, wounded distress to the otherwise nourishing qualities of photosynthesis and sustenance. Tran’s highly original vision is grimly confident -- an agonizing tone that seems exactly right for today.

Suzanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-2177, through Dec. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Triptychs capture urban panorama

The three big photographic triptychs in the main room of Karin Apollonia Muller’s show at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are savvy portraits of L.A. Muller identifies something elusive yet distinct about Los Angeles as a place, and her camera cleverly records it.

Her photographs were taken in and around downtown, putative center of this center-less city -- one to the west near Beverly Boulevard, one to the north near Chinatown, one along Broadway looking toward Bunker Hill. With filters, color has been washed out into a silvery-white light that flattens the Southern California sky and makes details something to be squinted at.

Each triptych is an urban panorama. The central panels show a void -- an empty lot or field surrounded by the jumble of urban density. The flanking pictures show what lies to the right and to the left of the central void, ordinary stuff that ranges from storefronts and office buildings to residential neighborhoods and a used car lot. Each picture is packed with visual incident, the prosaic poetry of daily life.

Tellingly, Muller’s triptych portraits of L.A. can be acquired whole or in parts. You have your choice of selecting the void, the margins or any combination thereof. A more apposite public portrait of this city would be hard to imagine.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through Dec. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.