In the Tiniest Gestures, Delicacy on an Epic Scale

The stunning centerpiece of Sandeep Mukherjee’s second solo exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery is a narrow, horizontal mural that, when all is said and done, wraps around four walls to a length of more than 110 feet. It’s a gently epic narrative of sensual pleasure and extrasensory wonder.

The mural is drawn on translucent plastic vellum, painted on the back with rich, flat colors. It reads from left to right. Deep rose slides into pink, whose temperature slowly rises before slipping into orange and, finally, yellow.

The saga begins with delicate clusters of bobbing heads, their linear contours made with pricks of a needle in the vellum. The heads--self-portraits--stare, smile and make exaggerated gestures with their mouths, as if attempting to speak. The poetic tension between the vibrant skin of colored vellum and the empty space of the pinpricks that delineate bodies makes them preternatural.

When the mural reaches the first corner, it explodes into a wide-eyed head, drawn in red pencil, which is surrounded by a radiant aura made by scoring and folding the vellum. Ambient light becomes a dramatic player, as palpable as graphite and paper. For several feet, the mural is nothing more than folded colors in starburst patterns, which are oddly exciting to examine. It’s as if you’ve had a sudden revelation of the extreme beauty that a sheer surface can contain.

As Mukherjee’s mural unfolds, small, faintly drawn, exquisitely precise naked bodies suddenly tumble into view. Round another corner and the bodies get larger, wrapped in pinpricked ribbons of colored light. Eventually they grow to life-size, while the ribbons are replaced by showers of stylized stars or flowers. Like a dream of flying, the imagery has erotic overtones, which are enhanced by the equivalence Mukherjee asserts between subject matter and art as skin.

At the end, the tumbling bodies disappear and the star flowers peter out. The wide-eyed, grinning portrait heads return, this time lined up in a playful loop-the-loop. Visually, Mukherjee sets a viewer gently back down on the ground.

A suite of four slightly larger-than-life drawings in another room uses the same marvelous techniques to show a standing figure (the artist) embracing an ephemeral shaft of light or falling leaves. Finally, an independent drawing is made from hundreds of horizontal lozenge shapes scored into the minty green vellum to create a surface as palpable yet permeable as water.

This last work recalls the perceptually mysterious visual conundrums of Vija Celmins, although by wholly different means. Mukherjee has found a unique process for tapping into a resonant tradition of Light and Space art.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Oct. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A Painstaking Exploration

of Cinematic Space

“Empire,” the new film by Paul Sietsema being shown at Regen Projects, takes its title from Andy Warhol’s famous eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building doing little more than being its big, phallic, unmoving self. Like its predecessor, it’s silent, black-and-white and shot in 16-millimeter film. Yet its specific inspiration was a whole different picture, also from 1964.

This one appeared in Vogue. The photograph showed the Manhattan living room of art critic Clement Greenberg, whose ideas on art were the antithesis of everything Warholian. Sietsema made a painstakingly precise, dollhouse-sized model of the room, furnished with vaguely modern and French provincial furniture and adorned with Color Field paintings by Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman and other artists Greenberg championed. The miniature set is the star of the fourth of his captivating movie’s six scenes.

“Empire,” like very different recent films by Steve Prina and Jennifer Bornstein, luxuriates in the sensuous qualities of film, which are so different from the sleek, crisp look of video that is ubiquitous today. Sietsema plays with exposures, ragged film leader, focus, lighting and duration.

His 24-minute film is partly an exploration of cinematic space, which is to television what Old Master painting is to video art.

Sietsema’s camera examines a grasshopper on a twig; the inner and outer twists and turns of an organic sculpture, apparently made of rough plaster (a segment slightly too long in duration); a linear hanging construction; Greenberg’s living room; a spinning crystal that appears almost digital; and a Rococo room. From the grasshopper that emerges from darkness at the start to the ornate interior that provides a grand finale, all the filmed objects were props fabricated by the artist.

Nature and culture, the organic and dynamic, the actual and illusionistic, the modern and the ancien regime--oppositions unravel under the camera’s caressing lens. A surrogate for your eye, it’s the dramatic actor performing in these stage sets.

“Empire” employs an almost Minimalist structure in the Greenberg sequence. A series of static shots pulls back from the stripe on the Newman painting on the back wall. The series repeats. The third time, the camera has been turned upside-down. The fourth shot scans the room in a sequence of stills.

And so it continues, articulating the space through a matrix of still photographs--which, of course, is how a movie’s illusion of movement is made. The technique resonates bizarrely against Greenberg’s own claim that the best art banishes illusionism by articulating the unique properties of its medium. “Empire” isn’t likely what he had in mind, which is one reason Sietsema’s labor-intensive film is so captivating.

Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Oct. 12. Closed Sunday and Monday.

The Natural World in

a Grain, or Cone, of Sand

It’s odd to encounter a solo gallery debut by an artist who has been exhibiting for 35 years. But such is the case with the 12 digital prints and an installation by Connie Zehr now at Newspace. This is the first commercial gallery exhibition for an artist who has shown in museums and university galleries since 1967.

Zehr is known for large, even room-sized installations of shaped sand, where the environment is like a microscopic moment in time that’s been stopped in its tracks for your contemplation. Childhood play, desert isolation, the actual fragility of terra firma and other allusions flood the otherwise seemingly empty space.

“Blue Cut Episodes,” the new installation here, follows in that lineage while also introducing gallery-goers to Zehr’s recent interest in digital technology. A thin, 8-by-16-foot rectangle of glittery black sand is the pedestal for three cones of sand. One is small, black and shiny. The other two are off-white and brown, and each of these in turn is a pedestal on which rests a disk of glass, one slightly thicker than the other.

On top of each disk is a fan-shaped digital transparency that has been twisted into a cone, its image showing flames flickering on sparkly sand. Dappled light filters through the transparency, on through the glass (which is, of course, made from silica) and onto the sand. The work is an artistic model of altered states of primal being.

The demonstration quality of a model is a limitation, though. More successful are the digital prints, mounted on aluminum, where visual experience is actualized.

Zehr’s prints show cones of sand arising from fields of sand, all in subtle, rich colors--pale violet, tan, ochre, various greens, black, gray and more. Like sand through the hourglass, they suggest the passage of time, while the evocative form also recalls everything from a volcano to a stupa.

Pulled in close in an effort to determine the relative size of the mound, you discover something unexpected: The tiny grains of sand approximate visible digital pixels, with which the images are made. Suddenly, Zehr’s provocative meditations on the natural world expand to encompass technology in a challenging and unanticipated way.

Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 469-9353, through Nov. 2. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Tracing a Wild Visual Ride Through Color

The six new acrylic and enamel paintings by Houston artist Aaron Parazette at Mark Moore Gallery are at once sophisticated and silly, glamorous and cartoonish, intellectually challenging and just plain fun. Encompassing such contradictory responses results in lively, urbane pictures.

Painted in flat, glossy, hard-edged colors, the body-sized abstractions suggest movement through space far and near. Loops, S-shapes and ampersands seem to trace a wild visual ride through a background that emerges from wide, horizontal bands of earth- and sky-toned color. Think Wile E. Coyote chasing Roadrunner across a mesa: What you see isn’t bodies, but speed in space.

This feeling of spatial dynamism is remarkable, given the flat, two-dimensional abstraction Parazette employs. Color and scale combine to perform the visual magic, aided by a precise pinstripe technique.

The pinstripes don’t follow expectations. Instead, a thin line of shocking yellow or pinkish violet will trace a green, white or black curve, and when it arrives at a horizontal band, suddenly turn off and follow that. The result is a competing set of almost subliminal shapes within the painting, shapes that demolish the eye’s attempt to read the surface as flat and stable. Stylish and deceptively simple on first glance, Parazette’s paintings are impressive.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Oct. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.