Frederick Hammersley, From Abstract to Inventive Clarity

Two years ago, Frederick Hammersley had his first solo show in a Los Angeles gallery after an 18-year absence. His abstract paintings had the presence of hidden treasures, secret masterpieces too boldly conceived and sharply executed to remain undiscovered for long.

Today, a second exhibition of the 82-year-old artist’s hard-edged oils on canvas and linen reveals how swiftly the times have changed. At L.A. Louver Gallery, Hammersley’s paintings have the presence of talismans, touchstones for a couple of subsequent generations of artists and viewers who are inspired by the quirky clarity of their vision and the relentless inventiveness the Albuquerque-based painter has brought to an extremely simplified format.

Compositionally, nearly all of Hammersley’s 20 mid-size works, which he painted between 1962 and 1996, consist of a handful of ingeniously interlocked squares and rectangles of solid color, with the diagonal of an occasional triangle thrown in for good measure. Most form stout symmetrical structures that exude the brick-by-brick stability of architecture built to withstand the ravages of time.

Hammersley’s palette is even more basic. All but two of his abstract images begin with black and white shapes. Five stop there, creating figure-ground flip-flops that would be passe if they didn’t fuse visual stimulation and emotional serenity with such seeming ease and killer precision.

Nine include a third color. These battleship grays, flaming red-oranges, desert-sky blues, deep forest greens and shoe-leather browns put a kink in the carefully calibrated balance established by each painting’s composition, infusing it with tense dynamism. Their crisp contours, high contrasts and saturated tints recall the hand-held flags sailors use for silent ship-to-ship communication. However, the only messages Hammersley’s paintings transmit are general: that pleasure and discipline sometimes go hand-in-glove, and that intensity of focus sometimes opens onto soaring expansiveness.

In “Double Dip” (1996) and “Connect Shun” (1976), he adds two colors to his black and white foundation, orchestrating complicated arrangements of planes that stamp themselves out in space while holding their edges together. Ratcheting up the optical energy, this pair of paintings makes Hammersley look like a Baroque artist in Minimalist clothing.

The only works in which three or more colors appear alongside black and white are those in which swooping curves replace the ruler-straight edges that dominate the show. “Object Lesson,” “Child’s Play” and “Pulse,” all made in 1963, resemble doodles whose empty spaces have been filled in with a rainbow of lovely shades, including pink, tangerine, periwinkle and taupe.

Your eye glides into these works smoothly. Riding their roller-coaster contours at various speeds, you take in their compositions bit by bit rather than all at once. Although they create different sensations than Hammersley’s geometric works, they have been included because, like his other pieces, they were painted with a palette knife. Not long after Hammersley made them, he began to use brushes for his curvaceous organic forms, reserving the knife for paintings whose shapes all have straight edges. A joy to behold, this beautifully installed show follows the logic at work in each painting: It breaks some rules, follows others and leaves viewers free to decide what these differences mean.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Miniature World: To step into Matthew Ronay’s first solo show is to find yourself in a Lilliputian land where logic does a loop-the-loop. At Marc Foxx Gallery, the 25-year-old Brooklyn-based artist turns the world upside-down by transforming familiar things into miniature stage sets. An abundance of stories dance off in every direction. Some get your imagination to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Others tug against its stick-in-the-mud stubbornness with a willfulness all their own.

Imagine what would happen if Rene Magritte and Joan Miro were hired to design a McDonald’s Playland for cats or hamsters, and subcontracted the paint job to John Wesley. There’s serious whimsy at work in Ronay’s enchanting sculptures, all of which are handcrafted from various combinations of wood, paper, metal and string, then painted in a crayon palette.

All but five of his 22 multi-part pieces rest on the floor, rarely rising above your ankles. The exceptions are “Pipe trick,” G “Peacock on cage cover,” “Flaccid bee” and “Elephant on beach on overcast day,” which include components mounted low on the wall. “Wig n’ hoop” is a 3-D diptych that hangs from the rafters like a circus stunt frozen at its most suspenseful moment.

To stand in the gallery is to have a bird’s-eye view of dozens of such scenarios, stop-action dramas in which a lot has already happened but the best is yet to come. For example, the teeter-totter-like structure of “Fable on faux art deco diving board” balances a fox’s bushy tail against a plump cluster of purple grapes, playing both off against a bird’s nest that rests on a Y-shaped branch, which would make any slingshot-coveting kid green with envy. In Ronay’s hands, Aesop’s fable about sour grapes becomes a springboard for metaphors that beget more and more metaphors, weaving a web of potentially infinite complexity.

People almost never appear. But plants, animals and inanimate objects are filled with enough loopy symbolism to amuse even the unimaginative. Ronay’s works are also endowed with just the right touch of deadpan pathos to redeem the world-weary.

In “Magic trick,” a houseplant sprouts a pair of hamburgers whose meat is cooked when a nearby boom-box plays rap songs. In “A boating incident,” a crow perches on a tennis shoe’s tip and stares intently at a slice of Wonder Bread, on which rests an upended picnic table’s top and a big black dice. In others works, a hobo’s sack acts as if it were Evel Knievel; a fluffy bunny tries its luck at a steeple chase; and a grasshopper escapes from the three musketeers (plus one sidekick) by leaping over a pond and three shamrock-shaped trees.

All is not fun and games in Ronay’s vignettes, some of which depict the aftermath of an avalanche, a futility-inspired fit, the grim reaper’s tiny scythe and an ice-cream cone that’s fallen to the ground. His charming art feels as if its core has been formed by the silver linings he has found in rain clouds, after the storms have subsided and the sun has begun once again to shine.

Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through Feb 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Stuff of Collage: In her first solo show, Los Angeles artist Lecia Dole-Recio takes collage far beyond its usual focus on cut-and-paste content. Rather than using this piecemeal technique to create unsettling juxtapositions between familiar images (which began with Surrealism), she zeroes in on the actual stuff out of which collages are made: paper, cardboard and tape.

In a sense, Dole-Recio does for collage what Robert Ryman did for abstract painting: strip it to its bare necessities to make it do (rather than depict) the unexpected.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, her six new works range in size from that of an open book to that of an advertisement on a bus shelter. Each consists of variously sized sections of notebook, butcher and watercolor paper, as well as corrugated cardboard and translucent vellum, which she has taped together in a manner that is neither slapdash nor intended to please a perfectionist. A good-enough-to-get-the-job-done quality suffuses her pieces, which embody a love of things rough around the edges alongside an equal desire for formal refinement.

Into these mix-and-match grounds, Dole-Recio uses a razor-knife to cut out dozens of imperfect squares, rectangles, diamonds, ovals and ellipses. Treating each of these openings as an ad-hoc frame, she then tapes a slightly smaller but similarly shaped piece of paper into it. Row upon row of such openings form loose grids that drift across the surfaces of her works.

This painstaking process ensures that very few elements overlap one another. By making everything occupy the same plane, Dole-Recio suggests that no part of a work happened before any other. This creates the impression that her abstract collages occupy a single moment in time. More importantly, it stretches the present out in space, luring viewers into a gravity-defying world of suspended animation. Ragtag sophistication never looked so good.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.