Huerta’s homes -- ruthless but warm

Over the last five years, the images of lower-middle-class houses that Salomon Huerta has been painting in oil on canvas or panel have increased in size. At first, he depicted snug bungalows and tidy tract homes, all realistically rendered to create the impression that viewers were standing curbside or perhaps passing by in a slow-moving car.

As he added second stories, porches and garages to his modest homes, the streets that ran parallel to the pictures’ bottom edges disappeared. The square footage of the lots grew, first gradually and then dramatically. Huerta’s most recent paintings, nine of which make up a sizzling show at Patricia Faure Gallery, present solitary homes whose zigzagged roofs bespeak budget-conscious additions required by expanding families and dreams of bigger and better things.

Nevertheless, nothing ostentatious appears in Huerta’s lovingly painted homes. The grandest isn’t as extravagant as a common ranch house most art collectors wouldn’t be caught dead in. The artist has stripped every extraneous detail from his meticulous compositions. Each is absolutely symmetrical -- a little too perfect to be comfortable and insufficiently out of whack to be actual.

In the past he painted individual shingles, blades of grass, palm fronds and the shadows cast by carefully trimmed shrubs. This created the illusion of three-dimensionality. But it sometimes made Huerta’s small paintings look cute. They recall both old-fashioned doll houses and David Hockney’s signature images of L.A. swimming pools and lawn sprinklers.

Huerta’s new works eliminate such heartwarming touches in favor of the hands-off detachment of digitally transmitted imagery from a few years ago, when the technology wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today and it was easy to distinguish between the virtual world and the real one. This allows him to smuggle some nostalgia into his otherwise ruthlessly stylized pictures.

Huerta’s paintings do not address the cutting edge of the present as much as they look back to the recent past, inviting viewers to pay attention to what has been left behind. Think of Huerta as an Edward Hopper for the computer age, and you’ll have an idea of the anxiety that pulses just beneath the brightly colored surfaces of his seemingly cheerful works.

Huerta’s houses occupy a strange no-man’s-land. They recall Steven Criqui’s painted landscapes, Wayne Thiebaud’s halo-like outlines of oddly complementary colors, the negatives of color photographs and views through night-vision goggles. As a group, they give harrowing form to the wisdom that bigger is not always better.

Zeroing in on the alienating isolation at the heart of the American dream, Huerta’s understated paintings make the cold calculus of upward mobility look deadly.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through May 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Blue skies and then some

Adam Ross is an abstract landscape painter who is also an archeologist of the imagination. Using only a handful of geometric shapes and even fewer methods of applying oil and alkyd to canvas, his new series of exquisitely sensual paintings, titled “Chronopolis,” conjures up fantastic worlds that have the substance, detail and dazzle of the real one. You’d be a fool not to visit.

At Angles Gallery, the painter’s seven works come in two sizes: 2 feet square and 2 by 4 feet. Although the format is as straightforward as anything at Home Depot, what Ross does with the conventions of landscape painting is anything but traditional. He turns it inside-out, all the better to bring its effects home to viewers.

After priming a canvas, he covers every inch of its surface with a beautifully painted sky. Blending bands of azure and turquoise with icy whites, he sometimes creates skies that have the crystalline clarity of L.A. mornings after rainstorms.

Others include subtle gradations of hazy grays and blurry whites, suggesting the presence of smog and industrial-strength pollution.

Two night skies give vivid form to the silvery glow of moonlight, accented with twinkling, jewel-like stars. And a pair of twilight views forgoes an organic palette of blazing yellows and fiery oranges for unnatural pinks and synthetic reds, both of which appear to be chemically treated.

In front of these gorgeous skies that extend far into deep space, Ross paints elongated capsules, extended ellipses and razor-thin lines. Interspersed among them are bead-like strings of circles, spindly grids that resemble antennae, spiky triangles, silhouettes of cellular structures and an occasional rectangle.

Many of these crisply rendered shapes float freely, like attenuated dirigibles tipped on their ends. But most disappear off the bottom edge of the paintings, creating the impression that Ross has rendered realistic views of futuristic cities’ skylines. Shaded as subtly as the skies around them, his geometric forms have the presence of streamlined space-age architecture.

Ross’s landscapes stand out because there’s not a bit of land in them -- just buildings and sky. The vivid scenes recall views from windows of towering skyscrapers or from steeply banking airplanes, when terra firma abruptly vanishes and a sense of suspended animation (and unsettling vulnerability) hits you with vertiginous impact.

Your brain, of course, is responsible for this sensation. All that Ross does is pepper his paintings with clues and fragments that viewers can’t help but turn into coherent pictures and believable narratives. A storyteller who knows that a few juicy hints engage the imagination more actively than all the facts in the world, he pulls viewers into the picture by pulling the ground out from under our feet.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Three who show promise

Three young artists strut their stuff in a raucous little exhibition at the Black Dragon Society, an unpolished but far from unprofessional Chinatown gallery named after the mah-jongg parlor that once occupied its raw quarters. Titled “Painting,” as if by default, the spunky show features eight acrylics on canvas and panel by Steve Canaday and Nick Lowe (recent graduates of UCLA’s master’s in fine arts program) and Rob Thom (who’s still a student there).

Adolescent irreverence rarely looks this good -- adamantly casual but with just enough sophistication tossed in to let you know that the artists know what they’re doing.

Nothing is fussed over in any of the paintings, which are generally big, rough around the edges and filled with details you’d savor if your eyeballs weren’t constantly being tugged to an even more curious part of the picture.

Canaday’s two works are so different in style and substance that they don’t appear to have been made by the same person. “Sugar Shack” is a graphic cartoon that depicts a pair of chipmunks running amok amid a trio of wide-bottomed women sitting around in the snow with no pants on. “Gray Goose, Park, Likkin’” is a messy mish-mash that turns Philip Guston’s rejection of abstraction on its head. If the noted abstract painter had lived long enough for senility to fully set in, his paintings might have looked like Canaday’s kinky composition.

Lowe’s “Tomato Farm” and “The Pretty Neighbor” are freewheeling fusions of Expressionist urgency and decorative dementia. In the first, a gigantic vine provides a snaky framework for meaty curlicues of paint. In the second, calm in the midst of chaos takes the shape of a colorful butterfly perched on the pointed tongue of a screaming, spiky-haired punk -- who, like Rapunzel, is trapped in a tall tower.

Thom’s three airbrushed images manage to be their own thing while resembling the addled offspring of Lisa Yuskavage’s buxom women, Laura Owens’ girly menageries and Richard Phillips’ overblown centerfolds.

Photo-realism haunts all of Thom’s cockeyed pictures, whose extreme shifts in scale create uncanny effects. In “God, I’ve Gotta Talk to You,” miniature owls, wolves and antelope emerge from the portrait’s nooks and crannies, suggesting a drug-induced hallucination.

The show hangs together loosely. The strongest link among its diverse works is the capacity to make sweet sentimentality curdle without turning bitter.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 620-0030, through April 26. Closed Sunday-Wednesday.

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Landscapes for your mind

Tyler Vlahovich puts verdant greens, earthy browns and rich umbers to such good use that it’s tempting to see his abstract paintings at Mary Goldman Gallery as landscapes. But the complicated spaces created by the variously scaled oils on canvas in his second solo show are too fractured, animated and refined (not to mention artificial, stylized and partial) to be anything other than the product of an astute formal intelligence.

In other words, works of art.

The only drawing is a splendid little pen-and-ink that highlights Vlahovich’s delicate touch. Titled “Paranoid Powered,” the page-size piece is a tour de force demonstration of his capacity to do just about anything with line, transforming the basic element of picture-making into an impressive compendium of textures, gestures and incidents, all of which are unusually evocative. Each component is so convincing and distinct that the drawing has the presence of a collage, a pasted together collection of far-flung parts.

A similar structure girds Vlahovich’s paintings. In some, he paints the background bright white, making the canvas look as if it’s a big sheet of paper on which he has doodled sharply demarcated patterns and clusters of abstract shapes.

Recalling the neat outlines in coloring books, “Carving Folklore,” “Listen Solitary” and “Emotional Graphic” disguise their visual sophistication by hiding it in a seemingly simple format. In other works, Vlahovich dispenses with crisp lines in favor of lightly brushed wafts of atmospheric color. “Brightly Against Reason,” “Oracle” and “Rapture” have the presence of erased paintings. Their wispy, dry-brushed forms have the substance of smoke, the presence of perfume and the intangibility of memories.

To emphasize his art’s capacity to lodge itself in your memory, Vlahovich has installed his two largest paintings, back-to-back, in a free-standing frame in the center of the gallery.

While it’s impossible to see “Exotic Ritual” and “Stereo Alarm Tint” at the same time, it’s also impossible to forget how one shadows the other as you circle the pair. Never settling into images, they insist that bodies and minds are made to be moved.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-8217, through May 3. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.