Colors’ energy defies words

One is always conscious of the limitations of language when writing about art, but rarely as acutely as with a painter like Katharina Grosse, whose work is all about the ineffable dynamics of color. There are probably factory names for the pigments she begins with, and generic designations for the various shades she concocts: hot pink, purple, yellow, lime, turquoise, green. But words are insufficient to indicate the way the colors mingle and shift in relation to each other, or to capture the sheer delight they inspire splayed across broad stretches of canvas.

Grosse, who lives in Germany, is best remembered here for the mural she installed in the lobby of the UCLA Hammer Museum in the fall of 2001: an amorphous, spray-painted mass of hot reds, pinks and oranges -- one of the most exciting works to appear in that space yet. None of the pieces in her current exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery -- her first major gallery show in the U.S. -- is quite as spectacular as that and other site-specific murals, which seem to seep out of the bowels of a building and take over its walls, doors and ceilings with stunning audacity. Consigned to the space of a canvas or sheet of paper, Grosse’s techniques inevitably enter into dialogue with the formidable legacy of abstract painting and, while they do hold their own, they also lose some of their radical vitality.

Still, the smaller works offer an array of pleasures all their own, as well as a nuanced glimpse into the artist’s rigorous modes of experimentation. There are several strains at play in the show. One is a more contained version of the mural technique, also using spray guns and characterized by the same lovely, swirling textures. Another involves broad, loose strokes of translucent neon colors that change when overlapped. This latter technique dominates in the 10 roughly 3-by-2-foot works on paper in the back room, which seem at first disappointingly sloppy but reveal, upon closer observation, an intricate rationale. The lessons acquired in these sketches are played out in the show’s most extravagant work: a 10-by-22-foot painting covered with overlapping, translucent, multicolored bars, each about 3 feet thick. There is a boisterous enthusiasm to this and to the other wonderfully dynamic paintings assembled here. Whatever else one might say about it -- however we might tie it up in theory -- color is great fun, and it’s a pleasure to encounter in such generous proportions.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through May 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

A charming fascination

In her video “Mi Vida Es Otra” (2002), Claudia Fernandez wanders through an unspecified urban landscape with a kaleidoscopic lens on her camera, pausing at various points to revel in the visual possibilities of common objects: a display of rainbow feather dusters, a bolt of pink checkered fabric, a pair of blue jeans, the weave of a multicolored purse. She remains completely absorbed in each for about one minute, rotating the lens gently to produce a mesmerizing dance of fragmented color, before removing it to briefly reveal the object reunified.

The sort of compulsive fascination that gives this work its charm also characterizes the two series of photographs that make up the rest of her show at Iturralde Gallery, in which she focuses on motifs found on the exterior of buses. One series, “Omnibus” (2002), consists primarily of geometric blocks, stripes, circles and swooshes rendered in a commercially cheerful palette of primary colors. The unexceptional designs acquire a certain excitement when they are isolated and abstracted by Fernandez’s camera, and then arranged in rows on the gallery wall.

The other series, “Planetas” (2002-03), focuses on a gold-colored bus decorated with a curving line of colorful globes that diminish in size from one end to the other, suggesting a wave of motion. Fernandez plays with this effect by chopping the wave into pieces and creating grids that exaggerate the motion. The result -- something like a simulated juggling show -- is strangely magical.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through May 10. Closed Sunday and Monday

*

Simple pleasures, subtly defined

The first U.S. exhibition of work by young Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, at 4-F in Chinatown, is an inconspicuous but subtly persuasive affair. Its principal theme -- “ephemeral beauty,” in the words of the press release -- is one of photography’s oldest preoccupations, and there’s little in Kawauchi’s treatment of it that is either new or unusual.

The moments she chooses to portray are simple ones: the explosion of a string of firecrackers, the long streak of a jet plume in an ordinary afternoon sky, the corpse of a hornet on a windowsill, two young girls on a school playground. Nor are the prints (three large and 10 small) especially eye-catching: their tone is muted and their presence in the gallery unassuming. But look closer and the work reveals exquisite delicacy, achieved through sensitive compositions, a careful attention to texture and the cultivation of a beautifully clear, clean, often whitish light.

In one peculiar, inexplicably touching image, the camera peers into the open mouth of a pale, smooth-skinned young woman to examine the slivers of silver tucked into the crevices of her molars. In another -- unsettling but difficult to tear your eyes away from -- it settles on the surface of a desperately overcrowded tank of fish that clamor upward with round, gaping mouths, the slick of water across their backs glistening in the light. Where movement appears it is slight but lyrical: the unfurling of slender paper streamers from a colorful, hand-held party favor; the vividly illuminated petals of a sunflower twisting in a night wind.

These are simple pleasures eloquently preserved and, like all ephemeral things, tinged with an undercurrent of loss.

4-F, 977 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 617-4948, through May 17. Closed Sunday through Thursday.

*

Theme and endless variation

Roland Reiss’ new paintings at Double Vision Gallery share four basic elements: a foundation made from flat, solid blocks of color; a very thin, loosely textured veil of a different color; a free-floating cluster of geometrical line drawings; and an assortment of thick, hard-edged shapes made with stencils. Within the parameters established by these components, however, Reiss produces a seemingly endless array of variations.

One work is luxuriously pink, another starkly black and white. One is dominated by an almost violent interplay of orange and red and smolders like a sunset; another feels open and vacuous, like the desert; another suggests outer space.

The textures vary from smooth and metallic to thick and cake-like to runny; the shapes are angular in some places, loose and curvilinear in others.

Because Reiss paints onto multiple sheets of Mylar (using the front and back sides), there is a curious sense of depth to each work; it is difficult, at times, to establish just how all the pieces come together. While they suggest landscapes in a very general sense and allude, in their geometrical elements, to architecture forms, the works have little mooring in visual reality, which makes the suspended quality of their components seem all the more arbitrary.

Whether these disorienting qualities strike you as exhilarating or maddening will probably depend on your affinity for Reiss’ aesthetic, which favors hard, flat tones and plastic textures. In either case, the exhaustive quality of his experimentation makes for a compelling encounter.

Double Vision Gallery, 5820 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100, L.A., (323) 936-1553, through May 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.