Childhood fantasy rendered with graceful Minimalism

Toys and models have been integral to Chris Burden’s art for decades. At Gagosian Gallery, they conspire to construct one of the most flat-out beautiful recent sculptures Burden has made.

The centerpiece of the show is an elegant, abstract bridge, 32 feet long and 8 feet high. The curved span, made from stainless steel parts cast from a century-old Erector set, is supported at each end by an open-frame, wedge-shaped base made from laminated plywood. At the uppermost point of the span, the sculpture is the thickness of five toy trusses laid flush against one another. The trusses flare out in both directions, creating a light-reflective metal “rainbow” about 5 feet wide at each base.

“Curved Bridge” is a captivating image of strength and power, rendered with delicacy and grace. It gains in poetic grandeur from its frank uselessness as a functional object -- no flatbed path for traversing is provided -- as well as from its invocation of memory. Burden employs a standard Minimalist structure -- clear, rational and modular -- but the heavy industrial fabrication associated with monumental Minimalist sculpture is forsaken.

The Erector set instead reverts to childhood fantasy. All the simple nuts and bolts are exposed. Given enough time, energy and concentration, you too might build such a wonder. The bridge becomes a metaphor for the span of a human life and the reach for human connection -- a bridge for bridging’s sake.

The show also includes six model bridges constructed from reproduction Erector set parts. Three are based on actual examples around the world -- at the Tower of London, Victoria Falls and Indochina -- and three are imaginary. What they lose in abstraction they gain in toylike playfulness. Burden has often made sculptures that simply re-create scientific principles -- the artist as Mr. Wizard -- and these models of diverse engineering possibilities further endorse the fundamental value of do-it-yourself empiricism. Experience, especially of the senses, is a deep source of knowledge, one often forgotten in contemporary art.

Which brings us to the two-part set of very different sculptures in the rear gallery. “Gold Bullets” is composed from 22-karat casts of pointed and rounded bullets, which stand upright on dark wood display cases beneath plexiglass boxes. The sculpture has sly fun with the artist’s own reputation, which was established with a performance in the 1970s in which he was shot in the arm by a rifle-toting accomplice. But it’s also the ethical embodiment of a society that simultaneously places value on weaponry and cheapens art. Burden’s bullets cause an elegant chill.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Welcome to land

of cultural tourism

For his show at Iturralde Gallery last summer, Cuban Conceptual artist Raul Cordero built and dismantled an image of the Eiffel Tower from snapshots, paintings and other pictures of it. This summer, he’s showing photographs and videotapes of another painstaking fabrication of a well-known monument -- albeit one without quite as glorious a history as the 19th century iron behemoth in Paris.

“The Rolling Landmark” is a version of the splashy illuminated sign at the entrance to the Las Vegas Strip, which welcomes cash-laden motorists to town. “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” yells the jaunty sign, spelled out in light-trimmed circles beneath a flashing starburst, with a diamond-shaped field lighted by a ring of flashing bulbs. Cordero, 32, mounted his smaller, slightly different version of the sign on a boat trailer, then set off on two road trips.

One journey took him through Belgium and Holland, where he participated in an invitational sculpture exhibition. The other started in Tijuana and ended in Nevada, where the copy of the sign finally confronted its model.

Along the way Cordero stopped at random cities and towns and set up his sign for the locals. Welcome to Fabulous Poperinge! Welcome to Fabulous Victorville! The show, which is part of the ongoing L.A. International Biennial, includes photographs of the sign at the outskirts of 18 European and American cities, together with maps, video documentation of the road trips and two photographs of the sign tipped over and smashed on a highway bridge, where gusty winds caused an accident. (Shattered dreams?)

Cordero transformed the well-rooted sign into a floating signifier, and he set it loose upon the land. In Europe it looks especially strange, perhaps because the real Las Vegas is now composed of so many casinos based on fabled European destinations, from Paris and Venice to Bellagio and Rome. Is Poperinge, home to beer-loving Belgium’s national hops museum, fabulous to the Poperingeans?

For that matter, is Las Vegas fabulous to Nevadans? Cordero’s savvy work welcomes cash-laden travelers on the crowded international highway of cultural tourism.

Perhaps the most compelling image is the one that shows Cordero’s sign set up in front of the actual landmark, partly because the minor design differences between original and supposed copy are suddenly apparent. Common are the observers who regularly mistake the Las Vegas aesthetic as a purely mimetic, ersatz culture rather than its own distinctive form of fantastic imagination. Cordero’s floating signifier charms because he knows that the journey, accidents included, is the most fabulous fiction of all.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-4267, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Imperial grandeur,

comic book style

Just in time for the latest American adventure abroad comes “Empire Style,” a smart and sardonic installation by San Diego artist Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Despite current public animosity toward France, Napoleon, it seems, had nothing on us.

Lowe has turned the main room into a time-warp salon, rendering with contemporary elan the late 18th century French taste for all things sovereign. The floor is covered with an area rug emblazoned with imperial eagles and laurel garlands, while the walls are lined with gilded commodes, stools, soup tureens and clocks -- one adorned with the central cast of Roman male characters from Jacques-Louis David’s iconic 1784 ode to republican virtue, “The Oath of the Horatii.” All are fashioned from brightly painted papier-mache and given a cartoonish bent, comic books being the lingua franca of our day.

What would a proper Empire salon be without hand-painted wallpaper showing the classical landscape? Here, the Arcadian vista is viewed from the center of a neatly lined parking lot in a suburban shopping mall. Nestled amid leafy trees beneath billowy skies, Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Bed, Bath & Beyond stand in for Constantinople, Thebes and the Colosseum. In the murals the faintly ridiculous quality of the cartoon furnishings gives way to an elegance of brushwork and luminous color -- which, all things considered, injects the scene with the requisite shudder of stark authority.

In the back room Lowe shows a dozen painted papier-mache versions of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s magnificent life-size sculpture “Apollo and Daphne,” in which the classical god of prophecy and poetry attempts to rape a gorgeous nymph, who escapes the crime by turning into a laurel tree. Bernini’s dazzling sculpture set Borghese-era Rome atwitter in 1624, mostly for the scrupulous mastery of its illusionistic carving.

Lowe’s knickknack-size sculptures are notably lumpy and purposefully inept, tilting precariously rather than with Baroque drama. Unlike Bernini, she emphasizes a homemade quality that eschews the official diversions of shock and awe. Each witty sculpture is painted in broad imitation of a different type of wood -- laurel, oak, walnut -- suggesting that the best escape from the oppressive powers that be is through a transformation into art.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Emergence

from the void

Christopher Murphy paints with skill and finesse, but he seems as yet unsure of a compelling subject matter. His debut solo show at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art includes a dozen handsome figure paintings, mostly either full-length single figures or seated figures in groups.

Murphy, who graduated with a BFA from Art Center College of Design last year, divides his technique in two. Space is rendered as smooth, sleek and abstract. Figures and objects are thick, dense and choppy, painted in a tactile manner reminiscent of artists like Lucian Freud. The attempt, not fully convincing, seems to be to convey a sense of material being in an intangible world.

Perhaps the limitation comes from the commercial stylishness of the compositions, which have their origin in photographic advertising. (Think models posed against blank backgrounds by Irving Penn or Richard Avedon.) Disjunction between the field of paint and the field of the magazine or billboard page goes unremarked in this otherwise dexterous work, which currently limits the dilemma of being and nothingness to a formal problem.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.