Squeeze, scrape, squeeze

When you look at a painting that you really like, it’s common to break out in a grin. Disconcertingly, paintings by Michael Reafsnyder are in the habit of smiling back.

At Michael Moore Gallery, three large new paintings and two smaller ones show the artist complicating the impressive work he’s shown there in his last two outings. Hefty loads of thick, chaotic oil paint in brilliant colors continue his eccentric homage to the 1950s painters of the CoBrA (Copenhagen/Brussels/Amsterdam) group -- Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, etc. -- Europeans who riffled through folk art, children’s scribbling and prehistoric imagery in search of freely expressive motifs.

Also still on board is the cheesy 1960s icon of the smiley face -- an emblematic half-circle topped with two dots. Made from thick coils of oil paint, the blank stare and its dumb grin diabolically update the CoBrA motifs of modern alienation to the scale of mass culture.

Like the paint, the logo is a sign for pleasure. But given the almost violent palette in which it is embedded, this bliss flirts with danger.

Reafsnyder has vastly enlarged the size of his paintings. The largest work here is 6 feet by nearly 8 feet. The concentrated power of his earlier, more modest works explodes.

Forget about brushstrokes. Paint on the surface is smeared with a squeegee, then more paint is layered in swoops, squiggles and arabesques by squeezing it straight from the tube. Reafsnyder gets an infectious rhythm going -- squeezing, scraping, squeezing -- that suggests release and renewal, not to mention a scatological spin on creativity.

He has also enlarged his field of references. In addition to CoBrA, the push-pull color theories of Hans Hofmann come to mind. So do the big, august abstractions of Germany’s Gerhard Richter, whose use of a squeegee to smear his lush paint tamps down their expressiveness, making them seem remote, austere and one step removed. Reafsnyder’s smears nod in that direction, but august gravity is replaced by wild-eyed charm.

His exuberant abstract fields of lush paint create a visual bramble, from which a rudimentary figure lurches into view. A wide vertical swath is made with the squeegee at the center, and a curved swath tops it. Distinctly phallic, this mushroom-headed figure is adorned with the smiley face, and some have snowman-style buttons down the front. The weird, playfully erotic kick is self-deprecating, and it contains a sly element of surprise.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Trapped inside a zoom lens

Dutch artist Aernout Mik makes his American gallery debut with three video projections that don’t take their viewing space for granted, as most such works do. At the Project, he’s built sculptural walls, halls and spaces that undermine any suggestion that his video can be shown just anywhere.

The most elaborate is “Organic Escalator” (2000), a frankly artificial scene of chaos. Before a catastrophic view of a toppling brick building, a crush of men and women trapped on an escalator appears nearly frozen in fear. Loud creaking sounds of timber under stress fill the narrow hallway in which the video image is projected -- and it soon becomes evident that the hallway, not the video, is emitting the noise.

The camera is static, but Mik has built a mechanized tunnel whose rear wall moves toward you some 10 feet and then slides back, as if breathing in slow motion. The fun-house corridor fits the Hollywood back-lot imagery. Manipulation is his motif.

The moving corridor also echoes the zoom lens of a camera, and moving cameras play a critical role in the other two videos, both from 2002. “Flock,” shown at the corner of two low, abutted walls, features drifting camera work. It glides randomly around inside a warehouse space, where clusters of apparent refugees mingle with a herd of goats. The image to the left takes a slightly different angle of vision from the one to the right, creating a noticeable sense of nausea in the viewer. This physical disorientation italicizes the anomalous imagery.

“Park” is the simplest (and strongest) of the three. The classic leisure subject of Arcadian happiness is taken for a spin in a contemporary urban park, where a half-dozen cheerful dogs get involved in the action. That action consists of a couple of dozen people jumping up and down among the verdant trees (or resting from the loony play). Mik’s camera jumps with them, in gentle, floating vertical rises and falls.

The odd scene, shown in rear-screen projection on a free-standing wall, is uncannily captivating. Generating a queasy exhilaration, it erases the transparency of typical camera images, which rely on illusion. Mik instead makes moving pictures in which the pictures move in a wholly unexpected way.

The Project, 962 E. 4th St., (213) 620-0692, through May 30. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

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Portrait busts for our times

The long-gone tradition of the portrait bust gets revived in a satisfying post-Jeff Koons group show at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, organized by artist Ricky Swallow. Swallow’s own contribution -- a hip-hop memento mori composed of a grinning skull wearing an Adidas knit cap, all sensuously carved from pale hardwood--is among the standouts.

So is the pair of sleek fiberglass heads by Steven Gontarski. The cold Neoclassicism of Houdon meets the pop chill of Darth Vader in these polished, pedestal-bound busts, where the heads are hidden beneath Magritte-like shrouds. Since they’re hidden, it’s hard to say just why one reads as female and the other male. Both are like blank screens that await a viewer’s psychosocial projections.

Eric Swenson, whose impressive sculpture of a deer grazing on a Persian rug is currently at the UCLA Hammer Museum, contributes “Ebie,” a carefully crafted, primate-like head with staring glass eyes. It sits on a shelf like some safari prize from outer space. “Ebie” looks at once totally human and utterly alien -- an icy form of estrangement that seems very up to the minute.

Rachel Feinstein diverges from the bust-length format with a small figurine, but she’s in tune with the high level of skill set by the show. Her bearded, mustachioed “Walking Dandy” struts along an imagined catwalk with one hand on a hip, the other at his collar and his legs abstracted into a swooping strut. Wittily made from modeling paste, it’s a veritable logo for our look-at-me age.

The weak link in the show is Francis Upritchard’s small, tabletop still life of bottles, their stoppers made of assorted figurines, but mostly for reasons of tone.

Handsome but conventional, it seems out of sync with the cool intensity that characterizes the other sculptures.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through Saturday.

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Birds, spiritual and savory

Birds perform two starkly different but related functions in the Rose Gallery selection of 22 black-and-white photographs from the 1970s to the 1990s by Mexican artist Graciela Iturbide. Related to her book “Pajaros” (Birds), published last year by Twin Palms, the exhibition pairs spiritual metaphor with mortal icon.

Seven pictures show chickens -- on the way to market, slung over a cement wall where blood trickles down, hung by the feet in clusters from a bicycle. In one of the most powerful, five women, cropped at the shoulders, stand in a semicircle plucking dinner as feathers drift to the ground.

The anonymity and matter-of-factness in Iturbide’s com- position releases a sense of timeless wonder at rituals of sustenance.

The remaining photographs frame birds as emblems of free spirit. Pigeons play with monkeys or joust with bulls. A tree seems to explode into a cloud of starlings. A silhouetted telephone pole alludes to a Christian cross, while the immense flock of birds dislodged from its arms moments before the shutter snapped suggests an ethereal departing soul.

Iturbide is a photographer for whom the camera is a beneficent trap. Her pajaros regard the world, but they are acts of poetic imagination.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through May 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.