Vision tutored by the camera

Recent photographs by Donald Blumberg, whose retrospective is currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, focus on quiet anomalies in the landscape. Subtle peculiarities in the world make a viewer increasingly conscious of similar oddities produced by camera vision.

Blumberg almost always works in black and white, and every piece in his handsome show at Jan Kesner Gallery (his first in six years) is a luxurious gelatin silver print. The use of black and white, given the difference from the colorful avalanche of pictures that inundate the modern commercial landscape, has been a traditional signal of artistic seriousness for artists of Blumberg’s generation (he’s 67).

The rural locations in England, Ireland, Scotland, Greece and New Zealand pictured in all but three of the 27 works further isolate the photographs from common concerns of pop culture. Blumberg moves us away from the familiar, but his aim seems to be to make us more conversant with the camera imagery we confront every day.

A pair of photographs shot in Wales show a rocky outcropping that juts into the sea -- one image taken from a distance, the other close up -- turning your eye into a zoom lens. The close view looks oddly monumental and imposing, the far view pastoral and bucolic.

Boulders on a hillside in Greece mingle almost imperceptibly with the stone foundations of a long-gone building. The ruined foundation becomes a subtle historical memory for the clusters of houses and other buildings glimpsed in the distance. Time telescopes.

A magnificent waterfall cascading down a mountain slope in New Zealand finds visual echoes in the patterns of striation on small stones in the foreground. Solid mimics liquid. Macrocosm reverberates against microcosm.

Blumberg, like other conceptually oriented photographers such as Eve Sonneman, often juxtaposes two photographs, which has the contradictory effect of emphasizing the selectivity of the camera’s lens. The existence of things outside the frame is italicized, gently underscoring the vastness of what has been excluded from the picture. Cameras invent context, and Blumberg’s work shows how knowing things have been left out is often as important as seeing what’s there.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-6834, through Dec. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Revuelta scenes mistake truisms for content

Last year’s debut exhibition at Iturralde Gallery of Spanish figurative artist Alfredo Garcia Revuelta was marked by a refreshing willingness to be aesthetically plain-spoken and direct -- that is, by a lack of ironic posing. However, his second outing demonstrates a pitfall of that approach: Leaving something out of a work of art doesn’t answer the question of what to put in.

Revuelta’s new works are familiar homilies, which he’s given the bold, punchy, graphic look of cartoons. A cheerful blend of pop and folk art, each of the 14 pictorial scenes is a canvas cutout whose forms are filled in with threaded lines of brightly colored glass beads. The artist gave his designs to craftsmen to execute (he encountered bead workers first in Bali, later in rural Mexico), and they performed with skill. Figures are typically outlined in black, while the colored shapes are flat.

The subjects are platitudes. In “Trapped by Time,” five cookie-cutter bureaucrats are held in bondage by the confining “ropes” of enormous wristwatches. “The Friends” shows three dully attired businessmen, their faces literally green with envy, surreptitiously sticking knives into the back of their flamboyantly dressed colleague, who clutches a trophy.

In “Tree of Love” -- at more than 6 feet tall, the largest work -- young sweethearts carve a symbol of their devotion into the trunk of a tree, whose leafy limbs coil into a tangle of knots. “Without Comment” replays the old European Baroque theme of the eager and uncultured rube being fleeced by a sophisticated and unscrupulous beauty -- here, two businessmen ogle a painting of a recumbent nude, who takes advantage of their distraction to reach out of the picture frame and pick one man’s pocket.

The simplicity and familiarity of Revuelta’s stories are undone by his appropriation of the folk-craft technique. Not only has it been used to more poignant effect by other artists (most notably Alighiero Boetti); it’s also hard not to be distracted by the knowledge that the unidentified artisans doubtless create works of equal caliber on their own. Why do they need him?

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Motherwell, thin but still bloated

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) is the most overrated painter of the New York School. Important as a writer and editor who could put an intellectual gloss on the radical abstractions of his more gifted compatriots, he became their unofficial spokesman. With a pedigree of European travels and a Stanford degree in philosophy, he was also significant as a social bridge: Motherwell helped make the scruffy bohemia of downtown Manhattan safe for conservative uptown collectors. But his own repetitious paintings are pompous and thin.

At Manny Silverman Gallery, a selection of 51 drawings, collages, studies and mostly small paintings spans most of Motherwell’s long career, although it emphasizes his later years (only four works date from the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of Abstract Expressionism). Automatism, a European Surrealist technique in which the artist suppresses conscious control of his hand to allow the unconscious mind to take over, assumed a boundless American scale in Motherwell’s art. It’s implied even in these mostly modest examples.

The show includes studies, drawings and other souvenirs related to Motherwell’s two most familiar bodies of work. The dark, brooding, sexually suggestive forms of his endless series “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” began in 1949. In the “Open” series, the lyrical expanses of color, interrupted by a few spare lines recalling doors and windows, date from 1967 and after.

Color and touch are the reference points of Motherwell’s work, regardless of series. The telling juxtaposition of two tiny abstract paintings, one from 1947 and the other from 1991 (said to be his last work), shows superficial movement over four decades. Color gets lighter; brushstrokes get looser. What began as a pontifical treatise on artistic absolutes evolved into vacant, bloated chatter on an artist’s signature style.

Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through Dec. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Reveling in wicked side of childhood

The buoyant graphic style of 30 line drawings in white pencil by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, whose L.A. debut is at Works on Paper Inc., instantly evokes cheery illustrations in a children’s book. Happy boys and girls cavort with bunnies and puppies.

As the boundless curiosity of children is frequently matched by their vicious cruelty, however, it comes as only a mild shock to discover on closer inspection what they’re up to with their pets. A little boy gaily saws the head off a flop-eared rabbit. A precocious little girl introduces a carrot to the wrong end of a dachshund. And the painted-on grin of a circus clown slowly transforms into a grotesque leer, thanks to all that drool at the corners of his mouth.

Suddenly the scatological implication of the brown paper on which Rondinone draws lurches front and center.

Rondinone’s wicked drawings are executed with elegance and flair, each figure isolated in the center of the page, anchored in the self-conscious space of art. And they’re stylishly installed.

At the artist’s direction, the drawings have been hung in two tiers of 15 on a single dark wall upholstered in loosely textured burlap. (The rest of the gallery is painted a warm mocha hue.) In a world where bunnies do unspeakable things to Easter chicks, older boys teach horrifying lessons to younger ones and frogs are less princes-in-disguise than lechers-in-pursuit, panache matters.

It may be worth noting that Rondinone executed the 1988 series while a 24-year-old student at art school in Vienna, city of Freud. Sex and violence are approached with wide-eyed wonder. The suite may not be a major revelation about the repressions and idealizations of childhood, but it does signal an artist of unusual stylistic verve.

Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 964-9675, through Nov. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.