A quiet riot, in a hothouse setting

At a time when mindless spectacles are filling museums and American culture is being so aggressively dumbed down that art is on the verge of becoming an underground movement, it’s heartening to see the new video installation by Jennifer Steinkamp at Acme Gallery. Titled “Jimmy Carter,” the L.A. artist’s silent light show is a blast from the past that provides some respite from the horrors of modern life while never making the mistake that art’s job is to serve up escapist entertainment.

Thoughtful and ravishing, Steinkamp’s dazzling piece of participatory theater is as accessible as anything on television -- and as imaginative as the best art in any medium. It’s radical because its optimism is not pie-in-the-sky utopianism but down-to-earth, this-is-it realism. To spend more than a few moments in the darkened gallery is to experience your mind and body working in concert, cooperating to process the generous sensory extravaganza.

Three walls are covered with projected images of thousands of flowers Steinkamp designed on a computer. Arranged in rows that run from floor to ceiling, the artificial asters, chrysanthemums, lilies, orchids and tulips form a rainbow of blazing colors -- screaming yellows, glorious oranges, off-key periwinkles -- all punctuated by verdant greens and gaps of absolute blackness. It’s hard to say whether you’ve stepped into an electronically transmitted hothouse or are somehow standing inside a giant stripe painting whose molecular structure forms an impossible cosmos.

And that’s only the beginning. Steinkamp has set her wallflowers in motion.

All the rows sway sinuously, in the manner of sea grass pulled back and forth by the surf. Individual blossoms buck the current, their stems and petals bending and twisting. Imagine a meadow jampacked with flowers so eager to reproduce that they can’t wait for bees to pollinate them. The flowers make jittery movements, zipping out of formation to cross-pollinate before looping back into place.

Up close, the cinematic image disintegrates into a grid of pixels that occasionally sit still but never for long. To stand back and take in the whole is to see patterns begin to take shape, only to dissolve into apparent chaos. But Steinkamp’s carefully orchestrated disorder inspires a wider perspective, a big-picture view in which everything just might make sense -- if your imagination’s up to the challenge.

Back in the 1950s, Harold Rosenberg coined the term “apocalyptic wallpaper” to describe abstract paintings that failed to convey the aspirations of their makers. Steinkamp’s installation turns Rosenberg’s term into a virtue: a work of art that is scintillating and scary, aware of its place in the world and bold enough to fly in the face of business as usual.

Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through Saturday.

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Paintings explore a new dimension

Pia Fries is a painter who doesn’t let her infatuation with trick-the-eye illusionism get in the way of her love of paint’s tactility. At Christopher Grimes Gallery, four large oils on canvas and three medium-sized paintings on paper are simultaneously juicy and lyrical, as resplendent in their physicality as they are graceful in their visual appeal.

The Swiss-born, Dusseldorf, Germany-based artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles demonstrates that, when it comes to abstract painting, you can eat your cake and have it too -- especially if you have talent to burn and aren’t afraid of making a mess.

Viewers reap the benefits of Fries’ celebratory paintings, which begin as big white fields. Onto these blank slates she silk-screens enlarged photographic images of rudimentary sculptures she has made from lumps of oil paint or bundles of brightly colored crepe paper. From a distance, these mechanically reproduced pictures resemble brush strokes. They form the backbone of Fries’ compositions, whose flesh and blood is made of nothing but paint.

In her hands, paint doesn’t function as it ordinarily does, smoothly covering surfaces or filling up space. The 47-year-old artist uses paint sculpturally, exploiting its plasticity to build 3-D reliefs that take turns pulling your eye into deep space and jumping off the wall.

A typical painting by Fries includes every color in the rainbow (and an indescribable variety of mixtures). More important, it includes an encyclopedic inventory of ways of applying paint: slathering, slinging, stirring, splotching, splashing, scraping and squirting (through specially designed funnels), to name but a few of her techniques.

No two components of any painting are laid down the same way. This suggests that the permutations available to Fries are infinite and that she’d need a powerful computer to see her vision realized.

The presence of advanced digital technology registers in her paintings in another way. Although Fries juxtaposes photographic reproductions with hand-painted passages, her works never have the presence of collages (whose cut-and-paste collisions are beginning to look very 20th century). In contrast, her up-to-the-minute paintings give sensuous shape to the look of digitally manipulated images in which disparate components fuse to form seamless hybrids.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Jan. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Schmalix: Colorful contradictions

Hubert Schmalix has titled the centerpiece of his first solo show in Los Angeles in 10 years “The Place Where I Got Caught.” To stand before the 10-by-15-foot painting, which depicts the corner of a life-sized brick wall in an Arcadian landscape, is to think that a more appropriate title would be “The Place Where I Made My Escape.”

Similar contradictions -- between memory and make-believe, truth and deception, the past and the present -- animate Schmalix’s images at Black Dragon Society. Rendered in the style of thickly outlined pictures in children’s coloring books, his three oils on canvas are filled with more mystery than their simple forms initially reveal.

In the foreground of the largest painting lies a crumpled sheet. Its freshly laundered whiteness contrasts dramatically with the ochre wall, olive lawn, purple leaves and orange sky. Although the best explanation for the stray sheet is that it blew off a neighbor’s clothesline or was dropped by inattentive picnickers, it’s difficult not to think of it as a toga, shed by someone in a rush to get naked.

Throughout history, gardens like this have served as perfect settings for illicit trysts. In Schmalix’s picture, the stage is set for such liaisons to continue in the present; between viewers and the web of historical references the painter has woven together with seemingly effortless ease.

The stillness Schmalix conveys in his harmonious composition has a classic, even antiquarian quality. But his modern palette and perverse paint handling suggest an unholy alliance between Paul Gauguin and Maxfield Parrish.

Schmalix applies paint swiftly, immediately sopping it up with ordinary paper towels. He does this repeatedly, leaving traces of the disposable towels’ embossed surface on his canvases. The outlines of his superimposed images rarely line up precisely, suggesting woodblock prints made too hastily to register cleanly.

Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes” and Roy Lichtenstein’s image of a woman’s arm sponging a stove clean lie behind all of Schmalix’s paintings, in which restraint reins in the excesses of Expressionism without blunting the emotional appeal or narrative range. The elusive artist, born in a small town in Austria, educated in Vienna and based in Los Angeles, disappears from his pictures -- all the better to catch viewers in them.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles, (213) 620-0030, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Zittel recycles without a cause

Andrea Zittel’s new works are based on a great idea: recycling. Unfortunately, all they do with this environmentally friendly concept is exploit it.

In her pieces, active conservation of the Earth’s resources gives way to a conservative view of how art works in the world: as a symbol of good intentions.

At Regen Projects, the gallery walls have been painted a rich brown. The luxuriant tint highlights the colorlessness of works from two ongoing series.

The first consists of embossed wall panels Zittel has made from recycled paper. Mounted in powder-coated steel frames, the squares of molded paper-pulp hang in variously sized groups. Their simple geometric patterns follow no logical sequence.

Like stylishly mismatched building blocks, Zittel’s clunky decorations symbolize the privilege of not having to decide which pattern is best. In this, they partake in the aversion to critical judgment that’s currently sweeping the art world, where shortsighted pretenders act as if the wheel needs to be reinvented.

The second series is represented by several white dresses Zittel made from raw wool. Like the wall panels, which are too expensive to even think about using as construction materials, the lumpy garments are impractical fashion statements. Filled with holes, they look like the offspring of moth-eaten clothing and something a sophisticated Neanderthal would love to wear.

As works of conceptual art, Zittel’s pieces recycle ideas that have seen better days. As utilitarian products, they fail to meet the rigors of the marketplace, where good intentions are no match for value.

An out-of-touch, let’s-pretend quality runs throughout Zittel’s body of work, in which dilettantism is raised to an art form, stylishness stands in for substance and token gestures take the place of practical activities. While her art may not be the emperor’s new clothes, it has the same sense of exaggerated self-importance.

Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.