Winding through a landscape of gems

Born in 1919, Frederick Hammersley is in the twilight of his career. But there’s nothing melancholic about his new paintings, four of which cap a gem of an exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery. They’re among his most joyously complicated works.

The judicious little survey features 15 oils on wood, Masonite and linen that Hammersley has made over the last 40 years (since 1968, he has lived in Albuquerque, N.M.). All are modestly scaled or smaller. Most are set in simple wood frames that were designed, carved and stained by the artist.

Not a single straight line is to be found among the sinuous curves and loopy doodles that make up the crisp contours of Hammersley’s abstract shapes. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle whose individual pieces have been painted solid colors. The paintings resemble magnified close-ups of such pieced-together setups, their indescribable shapes interlocking to form lively wholes.

The three largest works date from the early 1960s. Their horizontal format makes them look like landscapes, as does their earthy palette. Painted with palette knives, not brushes, their surfaces have the chiseled solidity of real substances such as dirt, sand and gravel.

Even the sky seems palpable in these taut paintings. Their basic forms recall Arthur Dove’s abstract landscapes, in which he compresses nature’s vastness into tight spaces.

The next six works are from the 1980s. To make these page-size pieces, Hammersley used a brush, which made for juicier, more fluid surfaces. He also keyed up his colors to include super-saturated eggplant, screaming tangerine and bubble-gum pink. These eye-popping tones contrast dramatically with a rich range of grays, browns and taupes.

The two paintings from the 1990s are the first in which Hammersley adds a multihued section to his otherwise single-color components. In “City Limits,” he blends lavender and lemon yellow into the opposite edges of a creamy white blob, suggesting a cross between a rainbow and a dish of Neapolitan ice cream. In “Pleasant Tense,” he gets bolder, blending an even hotter yellow into a gray shape as well as a white one. This jazzy abstraction looks as if it’s the pint-sized offspring of works by Henri Matisse and Stuart Davis.

The final four paintings, finished over the last two years, show Hammersley to be at the top of his game. With great panache, “Option Open” plays the three primary colors (red, blue and yellow) against their complements (green, orange and purple). To complicate the vibrant composition, Hammersley tosses a peck of pink right in the middle.

“Even Steven,” “Goal Rush” and “On Time” include even more elaborately shaded passages. This puts more space into the picture, suggesting that Hammersley has folded several light sources into his multi-planed works. But he also juxtaposes relatively large black and white shapes, providing stark contrasts that flatten space.

Less like brightly colored jigsaw puzzles than rainbows tied in knots, Hammersley’s idiosyncratic paintings pack loads of satisfying surprises into very small spaces. This is one of the most beautiful shows of the year.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Precision and prettiness

Over the last 10 years, abstract painting has become a lot more likable. Gone are the days when difficulty for its own sake was a hallmark of high art. Now it’s difficult to dismiss works simply because they’re good-looking.

At Chac Mool Gallery, Dan Walsh’s seven new acrylics on canvas rank among the more pleasant paintings being made today. But unlike most pleasant things, which are too innocuous to be memorable, the 42-year-old New Yorker’s hand-painted geometric abstractions stick in the mind’s eye long after you stop looking at them.

To an unfriendly eye, there’s not much to them. “Offering” is the simplest composition: a square of dusky lavender framed by lighter and darker bands of the same color as well as its complement, lemon yellow. These concentric squares rest, as if on a table, on a rusty orange stripe that runs along the canvas’ bottom edge.

“Screen” is a 60-by-90-inch horizontal painting that is structured similarly. Its palette of subtle beiges and softer lavenders includes delicate blues and grays alongside a thin racing stripe of yellow, which provides just the right jolt of optical drama.

In “Diversion” and “Untitled,” Walsh intensifies the color contrasts, playing pale purples against grassy greens, or tart yellows against lime tints so sharp they nearly make your mouth pucker. Synesthesia rarely is this playful.

Walsh also increases the complexity of his compositions, adding rows and columns of squares so that his easy-to-read images resemble keyboards or the control panels of push-button appliances. “Special” and “Composite” drive home these associations.

In the former, a series of 15 circles recalls an assembly line’s rollers, along which slides a big box the color of chocolate mousse. The latter appears to be a close-up of a blocky TV console, whose black-and-white set is stuck on a test pattern more mesmerizing than most programs.

The only dud in Walsh’s second L.A. solo show is “Prop,” a vibrant blue background on which is arranged an orderly grid of 77 stop-sign-red rectangles surrounded by fuzzy orange and green outlines. It lacks the asymmetrical verve of Walsh’s other works. But the clashing colors are the real culprits: They crush the subtlety characteristic of his best works under the aggressive weightiness of a solid brick wall.

Sticking out like an ugly sore thumb, “Prop” paradoxically reveals how refined a colorist Walsh can be. His six works in the main gallery combine equal measures of precision and prettiness to demonstrate that delicacy and accessibility are in no way opposed. Paintings that look good on first glance can hold up over the long haul.

Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792, through Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A sizzle that quickly fizzles

The battle between sizzle and fizzle heats up in Torben Giehler’s four new paintings. At the Happy Lion Gallery, the young artist’s abstract canvases have no trouble getting your attention.

Each is big (three are 7 feet square). Each consists of dozens of hard-edged, sharply angled planes of solid color. Some of these are blocky, like imperfect squares; others are long, like thick lines. Their keyed-up Pop palette ranges from school-bus yellow to neon-enhanced turquoise and includes battleship gray, supersaturated pumpkin, midnight black and fleshy salmon.

Each painting is composed on a diagonal axis. This makes the picture plane look as if it’s tilting, simultaneously slipping back into space and spilling off the canvas’ bottom edge. Viewers susceptible to motion sickness may experience a tinge of vertigo.

But eye-grabbing theatrics go only so far. Once Giehler’s paintings get your attention, they don’t do much with it. The works in his West Coast solo debut, which is part of the L.A. International Biennial, have the presence of rudimentary exercises found in teach-yourself design manuals, whose titles often are some version of “Abstraction for Dummies.”

Art history buffs will doubtless see Giehler’s neatly taped slabs of squeegeed acrylic as the amped-up offspring of Piet Mondrian’s lively grids and Al Held’s spaced-out abstractions. Viewers up to date with computer software will discern the influence of flight simulators and digital graphics. Both views are appropriate.

The problem is that the sources Giehler draws on are more compelling than what he does with them. Plus, other young artists, such as Kevin Appel, Philip Argent and Stephen Heer, already have advanced the dialogue between cyberspace and abstract painting far further than Giehler’s clunky fusion of the two worlds. Simply rehashing old-fashioned ideas about compositional dynamism, his works are extremely fast reads whose sizzle fizzles all too quickly.

The Happy Lion Gallery, 963 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1360, through Aug. 9. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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Celebrating paint’s physicality

Measured by the pound, the paintings in “Not the Usual Suspects” are heavyweights. You’d be hard-pressed to heave one of Wess Dahlberg’s multilayered monochromes off the wall of Manny Silverman Gallery. And you wouldn’t want to carry very far one of James Hayward’s or Michael Reafsnyder’s thickly built-up oils on canvas and panel.

Works by Richard Allen Morris, Dennis Hollingsworth and Sam Tchakalian wouldn’t be so hard to handle. But the three artists also use paint as if there’s no tomorrow, piling it on with abandon and slathering it around as if their lives depended on it -- all the while having so much raucous fun that you’d have to be a curmudgeon not to want to get in on the action.

Despite the massive amounts of paint squeezed straight from the tube, smeared by the brushful and troweled on with spatulas, none of the two dozen paintings feels heavy-handed. Each more than makes up for the weighty solidity of its heavy-duty materials with a sense of gravity-defying energy that’s nothing if not jubilant.

It’s tempting to think of the exhibition, which was organized by Hayward, as uplifting. But its works are too silly, too sexy or just too much for that. Celebrating the down-and-dirty physicality of paint, they all use vivaciously tinted pigments dissolved in media of various viscosities as raw materials that are unbelievably elastic.

As a group, the six West Coast painters eschew the high-minded mumbo-jumbo that often accompanies abstraction. They also go far beyond the old-fashioned idea that painterly gestures are authentic expressions of an artist’s inner sentiments, which are otherwise inarticulate.

In that sense, the works in “Not the Usual Suspects” are soulless -- and all the better for it. Rather than pretending to convey the artists’ private feelings, these gregarious paintings proudly take their place in the world of shared social space, where viewers are free to engage them howsoever we choose. What initially appears to be out-of-control excess turns out to be fearless generosity.

Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through Aug 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.