Icons of the saints of pop culture

Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings of wan young men and women fall naturally into the category of portraiture. Celebrity portraiture, if you’re young and hip enough to recognize her subjects. Peyton’s work also nestles rather snugly into another, less likely tradition, that of the devotional painting, whose sacred subject is intended to inspire awe and reverence.

Peyton’s paintings are, themselves, devotional acts toward the saints of pop culture celebrity -- musicians, artists, fashion types. In her new work at Regen, she paints Meg White, drummer for the White Stripes, and a fine-featured young man named Nick, whom supplementary materials identify as British artist Nick Relph. She’s also added to the mix a painting of a cat and dog at rest together, and a copy of a famous portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

The small, oil-on-composite-board paintings typically show their subjects close up, as in casual snapshots. In one painting, Nick rests on the grass at a park. In another, he looks up from his reading, and in another his head rests on a pillow, eyes closed. The intimate view and first-name basis prevail, although it’s unclear whether that view derives from the true intimacy of a real relationship or the false intimacy cultivated by the media’s intense coverage of celebrities: Peyton, who lives in New York, bases her pictures both on photographs she’s made herself and on others she’s culled from the mass media. In any case, the images coalesce into something of a visual diary (a scrubbed-clean and sugarcoated corollary to photographer Nan Goldin’s) that’s as much generational as it is personal. The paintings feel intimate, and that seems to be the point: to bridge the gulf between humble us and hallowed them.

On their independent merits, these are pleasant enough paintings. The best of them -- “Nick (La Luncheonette December 2002),” for example -- have a quiet tenderness and sensual immediacy. Their lovely patterns (usually depicting bedding) and vivid violets, aquas and emeralds recall the celebratory beauty of Bonnard and Vuillard’s domestic interiors. Intimacy with paint makes these sing.

At their weakest, as in the pet double portrait, the pictures feel simply pedestrian, adequately rendered but not compelling enough to elicit much of a response. In “Meg With a Broken Arm (Meg White),” the subject appears sallow and bruised, and Peyton’s worshipful stance veers uneasily into voyeurism.

In the six or seven years that Peyton has been showing this kind of work, she’s become an art-world celebrity herself. Fame, though, is not synonymous with talent -- a lesson regularly made clear on reality TV. Although Peyton does a deft job of bringing remote personalities nearer, the next divide she must bridge is the one that separates her remarkable success and her less-than-remarkable vision. Until those two feel more in line with each other, paintings like these will earn the devotion only of Peyton’s most fervent believers.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, L.A., (310) 276-5424, through June 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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An insomniac on sleeplessness

Robin Palanker’s new work at Hunsaker/Schlesinger explores the condition of insomnia, the isolation and disorientation that come from remaining conscious when the rest of the world is not. Four of the pastel and dry pigment drawings, each titled “Sleep Won’t Come,” show houses set apart from other structures. Like a persistently active mind in the wee hours, their lights continue to burn in a sea of calm darkness.

When the L.A.-based Palanker shifts her focus from the physical state of sleeplessness to its more psychological dimensions, her work grows correspondingly more involving. In “Sometimes a Fluttering Sound,” a dozen white birds flap and hover over a pair of empty gold armchairs in a blue-walled living room. It’s a poetic image, almost hallucinatory, evoking absence and what the mind and spirit conjure up to fill it. In other, similar interior tableaux, featuring a hyena on a bed and an armadillo on a kitchen floor, that same incongruity is present, but the poetry falls flat, lapsing into caricature.

Throughout, Palanker draws in deep, rich tones, creating velvety surfaces. Lacking detail and specificity, forms verge on the generic, which causes the work to feel slightly bland at times. In drawings such as “Ice Palace,” however, this generalized approach pushes the scene to a more abstract, allegorical level. The landscape is stark, a vast blue plane scattered with little pitched-roof houses and other simple, boxy structures, like children’s blocks abandoned after play. In one of the closest structures, the absence of a wall reveals a man slouched on a chair with his legs crossed in a posture of patient waiting. The pale, early-morning light promises relief from his boxed-in isolation. These drawings apparently serve the same function for Palanker herself, a lifelong insomniac.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through June 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Cataloging the cultural landscape

The beauty of Ed Ruscha’s early photographic work, writes Jeff Brouws in his new book, “Readymades,” “is that it appears authorless, effortless, totally objective, artfully artless.” It was Ruscha’s work that inspired Brouws to begin his photographic quest of the last 15-plus years: to make and gather images of like forms and structures in the environment, in that same crisp, seemingly transparent, objective style. Brouws, working in color and black and white, has targeted abandoned gas stations (a direct homage to Ruscha), shop signs, old drive-in theaters, storage units, tunnels and much more, distilling each into neat squares of information. Excerpts from his ongoing enterprise make up the delightfully rich mini-survey now at Craig Krull: “American Typologies: 117 Photographs of 10 Different Subjects, 1987-2003.”

Ruscha might have gotten Brouws started, but Walker Evans and Bernd and Hilla Becher seem to have helped him along on his compulsive, good-natured, deeply caring visual catalog of the American cultural landscape. Like Evans, Brouws gravitates toward structures that have lost their luster, forms that have the emotionally wrenching patina of the obsolete. Brouws’ “Language in the Landscape” series presents snippets of signage that read like syncopated captions to daily experience. One reads “try”; a second,”let us help you”; and a third, “temperance.”

The “Farm Forms” pictures have the detached formalism for which the Bechers are known. Each of the two dozen images here presents its subject with sculptural clarity. Church, grain silo, animal pen, barn, standing or fallen -- each functions like a discrete letter in the spelling out of complex sociological, cultural and historical phenomena. Brouws practices a kind of cultural anthropology that, not surprisingly, feels edgiest when it scrutinizes the forms and structures of the present: the boxy storage units that whisper of consumerism gone amok; the surveillance cameras that peer down at us, Cyclops-like, suspicious; the strip malls, viewed across a sea of empty parking spaces.

Brouws achieves with aplomb the same artful artlessness he admires in Ruscha. The abstract qualities of his subjects emerge emphatically when the pictures are seen in rows and grids. The photographs, in numbers, generate a snappy visual rhythm, their socio-historical implications providing a deep undercurrent of meaning.

Also on view at the gallery are works by Mike Rogers, a fellow typologist. His film chronicling a cross-country road trip fails to rise above the level of amusing conceptual exercise, but his photomontage “Formalities,” a compilation of small color images of ribbon cuttings, groundbreakings, award presentations and the like, does what the anthropological gaze does best: make our all too familiar rituals appear odd and exotic.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through June 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A map of fragile sensibilities

Argentine artist Gustavo Lopez Armentia makes his L.A. debut at Yoramgil with an eclectic, variably engaging array of paintings and sculpture. Throughout, Lopez Armentia addresses notions of place -- geographical, metaphorical, temporal and otherwise. Poignant passages and nuanced texture abound in the work, but often to such excess that fragile emotional conditions are no sooner evoked than squelched.

“The Lost Victory” (2002), the largest work in the show at nearly 10 feet across, is also the most restrained -- and moving. A pale landscape spreads the width of its two joined panels, coated in a mixture of ground quartz, marble and resin. Hills, horses and trees emerge vaguely, drawn as if in ash on a smooth eggshell surface. Beneath the horizon are two excavated strips in the shape of opposing cannons. Each has the texture and tone of burned earth and bears within it images of smaller cannons and a few human figures. Below the point where the tips of the larger cannon shapes meet, Lopez Armentia has attached to the surface an inky cascade of bits and pieces -- broken toy wheels, small sculpted body parts. In spite of its quiet stillness, land has a memory of its own, especially contested land upon which wars have been fought. Like psychic traumas, the horrors roil beneath the surface, silent and destructive.

Lopez Armentia seems to be continually navigating in this work. Web addresses, place names, city streets and major museums all figure in his maplike imagery. The shadow of fellow Argentine Guillermo Kuitca falls heavily on this work, but Lopez Armentia’s sensibility is distinctive. History as well as humor, memories and melancholy are thickly layered in the mixed-media paintings as well as in the free-standing and tabletop sculptures. Clutter brings some of the work down, but Lopez Armentia’s eloquence helps raise the rest.

Galerie Yoramgil, 319 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 275-8130, through June 22. Closed Monday.