Classicism in mural by Yamaguchi

Cartoons have been around so long that there’s no reason not to call some classics -- genre-defining high points whose beauty hasn’t been surpassed by the new-and-improved versions they’ve inspired. But few contemporary artists who are interested in cartoons are also interested in classicism -- in the balance, restraint and simplicity that once governed art but have long been replaced by anxiety, excess and complexity.

An exception is Ai Yamaguchi, a Tokyo-based painter whose second solo show in Los Angeles features a brilliantly composed and impeccably executed mural that wraps around five walls of Roberts & Tilton Gallery. Titled “Sukutoko” (meaning “place to save”), Yamaguchi’s wall painting tells the tale of nine little girls who have been sold into prostitution during the Edo period (1600-1868).

The 26-year-old artist depicts the girls between shifts, petting kittens, opening oysters, painting seashells and burning incense. While such activities often function as thinly veiled metaphors for sex (all the better to titillate popular comic book readers), Yamaguchi’s prepubescent courtesans are sexless. They’d be angelic if they weren’t driven by the Japanese equivalent of the Protestant work ethic.

All wear gorgeously patterned skirts that cover them from waist to ankle. Their flat chests lack nipples. And dazzling blue pupils constitute their eyes. Rather than opening onto souls, their big doe eyes resemble surgically implanted sunglasses. Protecting their privacy, these impenetrable orbs make them look interchangeable and somewhat robotic.

More important, the girls are entirely absorbed by their activities. To scan the scene from entrance to exit is to see them performing personal rituals so self-contained and all-consuming that there’s no room left over for standard fantasies or cliched projections.

Just inside the front door, a cut-away view of the larger-than-life-size teahouse (painted sumptuous shades of burgundy and brown) angles down from above like a stairway from heaven. Fifty feet farther on, at the end of its dock-like deck, drifts a flotilla of gigantic turquoise lily pads. Across both, Yamaguchi’s nine girls appear repeatedly, in a variety of groupings.

No borders divide the multi-scene painting. This suggests that it occupies a space where time spirals back on itself to form a phantasmagorical world that’s complete unto itself. Yamaguchi also uses negative space effectively, transforming the wall’s empty whiteness into an electrifying contrast.

Melancholy, earnestness and just a touch of escapism suffuse her ambitious mural. It’s well worth a visit, especially since it will be painted over when the show closes.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through Oct. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Exploring depths of dogs’ world

Robert Zakanitch’s heart-warming paintings of pugs, poodles, Pomeranians and Pekingese invite the question: “How would life be different if people treated contemporary art like a beloved pet?”

But rather than using his fifth solo show in Los Angeles as a soapbox from which to indict the public for its lack of concern for the visual arts, the New York painter does something far more generous. At Patricia Faure Gallery, he presents a body of work that treats every visitor as a beloved pet.

Being treated like a dog is nothing new to viewers of contemporary art. For the better part of the last century, we’ve been prodded, provoked and had our noses rubbed in avant-garde artists’ pet issues. What’s new is the kindness, respect and civilizing equanimity of Zakanitch’s beautifully painted pictures.

Showering anyone who stumbles in off the street with indiscriminate affection and unconditional love, his readily accessible, larger-than-life images get right down to business -- improving the world by treating all of us as if we deserve the very best. Zakanitch paints with masterful aplomb. Each canvas is two works in one. Most are divided either vertically or horizontally. On one half, painted white to resemble a page in a sketchbook, he uses a pencil to sketch various views of a dog. On the other, painted velvety black, he uses a brush to paint a single large formal portrait.

The drawn halves are casual, offhand and occasionally goofy. Next to the Pomeranian, Zakanitch has scrawled “yap, yap, yap” and drawn cartoon lines to signify the pint-sized pet’s high-pitched barking. A Japanese Chin, seen from the front and in left and right profile, appears to be posing for a mug shot. Both bring a little levity to a high-minded style of painting made famous by Cy Twombly.

The painted halves of Zakanitch’s canvases are even better. Each is done with such comfortable confidence and whiplash efficiency that the various drips, smears and unfinished sections only add to the sense that Zakanitch has captured each sitter’s essence in a carefully observed session.

Posing like a pop star, a Chihuahua looks both regal and surprised by all the attention lavished on it. For their parts, a Shih-tzu and German Shepherd stare out with expressions as complex and nuanced as those of any human. If contemporary art is anything like an old dog, Zakanitch teaches it a new trick, whose significance is profound.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Oct. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The fine details of chaos and order

From the look of the 11 fabulously theatrical paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery, the only thing Marcelo Pombo loves more than making a mess is cleaning it up. Over-the-top yet under control, his labor-intensive enamels on panel flaunt that life is an ongoing dance between chaos and order.

They also insist that art’s job is to intensify the interaction between these potent forces, all the better to draw viewers into the drama. Pombo’s paintings are landscapes. All are wider than they are tall. A horizon line divides each into land and sky. Trees appear frequently, as do flowers and foliage. The sun and moon occasionally shine from the sky, along with hundreds of candy-colored planets and pin-prick-sized stars.

A dolmen overgrown with blossoming vines and a stereo system set on a modern table are the only man-made elements. But perfectly ruled squares and rectangles suggest one of two things: Either Plato was right and God is a geometry major, or some lesser being inserted shapes that resemble picture frames, window panes, doorways and computer scenes into Pombo’s stylish paintings.

To look more closely at the 44-year-old, Argentina-based artist’s landscapes is to see that although nature provides their skeletal structure, their flesh and blood, not to mention their heart and soul, resides in the elaborate patterns that spill from his brush. In other words, what he depicts is far less fascinating than how he does so.

Pombo is a bit of an alchemist. He mixes high-keyed sign-paint with various thinners to change its viscosity. This causes some of his colors to flow freely, mix with others unevenly (like oil and water) and coagulate into tiny dots that sometimes look as if they’re 3-D. Like an obsessive miniaturist, he drips increasingly smaller droplets atop one another, forming tiny concentric rings that make your eyes vibrate.

He’s also an ambitious realist. Imagine what the world would look like if you could see its every molecule without losing sight of the objects they form. This gives you an idea of the dual-vision complexity of Pombo’s paintings. Fusing fantasy and reality, his exquisitely artificial works look at the big picture without overlooking its myriad details. He is a painter of the microscopic sublime.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Oct. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Simplicity mixes with the offbeat

If Dr. Seuss and David Lynch designed a line of Hallmark greeting cards, they’d probably look like Todd Hebert’s new paintings and drawings at Mark Moore Gallery. Lovely to see and just a little demented, Herbert’s images inhabit a world where innocent whimsy and inexplicable weirdness spiral around one another in a dizzying swirl of uncanny fascination.

Each of his smartly composed and dramatically cropped pictures boils things down to a few basic elements: a common object or two that bespeak the placid pleasures of suburban leisure set in surroundings that are subtly unsettling. In one of the four still-lifes, a red and white plastic cooler fills the 5- by 6-foot canvas, towering over the pine forest in the background like a Brobdingnagian monster. In another, a basketball hoop, net and backboard peek from behind the head of a snowman, whose frozen smile is too close for comfort.

Picnic tables, cabin porches and movie snacks appear in Hebert’s other works, along with TV antennas, satellite dishes and plastic owls designed to keep pesky birds out of gardens. Set against tree-covered foothills, an empty lot in Chinatown and a sublime iceberg, his four landscapes have the presence of stills from movies that unspool in the imagination.

The stories are never specific. They are loaded without being heavy-handed. A large part of their pleasure is because of the surgical precision with which Hebert handles paint. The 31-year-old artist, who was born in North Dakota, got a master’s in fine arts in Rhode Island, did a fellowship in Texas and now lives in Los Angeles, combines the out-of-focus fuzziness of an airbrush with the razor-sharp clarity of hand-painted illustrations.

Simple realism and offbeat fantasy fuse in his oddly familiar pictures, as do old-fashioned surrealism and newfangled cartoons. The best ones give disquieting shape to the indefinable space where dreams and nightmares rub against one another.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Nov. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.