A hybrid challenge to slickness

In eight new, mostly large and entirely self-assured hybrid works, Steven Criqui continues to push the boundaries between photography and painting. Large-format photography, unlike painting, suffers from an inherent vice: A slick, unchanging, uniform surface emphasizes imagery at the expense of materiality. Criqui manages to subvert the problem in an insightful way: He sets up a conversation between the image and its fabrication, which draws you in.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, his subject is a post-Ed Ruscha vision of Los Angeles in all its blank, sun-bleached, abject beauty. Graffiti, strip buildings, commercial signs, the Watts Towers, neighborhood bungalows, gas stations -- Criqui’s work provides an inventory of the vernacular art and architecture that make up the improbable city. He photographs the landscape head-on, in a manner that seems as unadorned as possible.

Slowly, though, the pictures begin to yield secrets. The front end of a car at a gas pump doesn’t match its back end, revealing that two automobiles are impossibly occupying the same space. A telephone pole at the right side of a picture is echoed by a street light in the center, but that light pole doesn’t go all the way to the top. Instead it appears to skip to the left, where the vertical line picks up out of thin air. In another work, lavish, lacy graffiti on the side of a building spins out of control, becoming a series of circular swipes of color on the surface of the picture.

Elsewhere a red brush stroke erases an Exxon sign. Part of the mark seems to be actual paint, but part of it seems to be a photograph of a red brush stroke. Typically, objects in a Criqui hybrid are doubled, disappear into thin air or emerge from nothingness. Everything appears provisional, temporary.

The vistas have the visual quality of a mirage, where the light is bright and the physical world melts into spellbinding loveliness. Criqui courts a kind of “visual hiccup,” where an element glimpsed within a scene suddenly slips from view.

Criqui makes this work by feeding photographs into a computer program, piecing images together, and emphasizing or erasing the lines where different pictures are joined. He employs another program to make painterly marks -- blurs, stains, brush strokes, smudges, etc. -- within the computerized photograph. Finally, he uses a commercial printer to create ink-jet images on canvas, which he then paints.

The four edges of each canvas are lined with a white border, which subliminally underscores their inspiration in old-style photography. The scale, though, is painterly -- the biggest work is 7 feet wide -- while the varnished surfaces heighten the chromatic punch.

By contrast, two of the most powerful, hypnotic works eschew color altogether. “Otel” shows a tattered neon sign on the facade of a motel that has seen better days, the patterned screen of cement blocks across the front announcing a midcentury modern motif adapted from traditional Middle Eastern architecture. “Signs/Light” focuses on blank horizontal and vertical signs atop an innocuous strip building.

A smudge of white across the canvas surface blurs the light in “Otel,” suggesting an overexposed or damaged piece of film. An ominous quality of surveillance descends over the hapless scene.

In “Signs/Light,” a glow radiates from the blank signs like an announcement of the Second Coming. Something always seems to be just about to happen in Criqui’s images, but just what’s next is never fully clear. That imminence is bliss.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through April 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Kunath does odd work, but well

German artist Friedrich Kunath employs a variety of mediums -- painting, photography, sculpture, video -- to a singular end. Fragmented experience thwarts a quietly desperate desire for human connection in this engaging work.

The fragmentation is physical. At Blum & Poe, where the 30-year-old artist is having his American solo debut, Kunath clusters small drawings and paintings in a group, much as Raymond Pettibon does. His sculpture of an anchor seems to be sinking into the gallery’s concrete floor, because its shank and arms are actually composed of three separate pieces. The video “About Souffle” is shown not as a projection but on nine individual monitors stacked in a grid, the image likewise chopped up.

“Four Seasons of Loneliness” is also a grid, this time composed from six rows of 10 snapshots. The top and bottom rows show seasonal landscapes. The four rows in between show the artist posed in the landscape, where he acts out alphabet letters that spell out the work’s title. (The exception is “four,” which turns up as a numeral on the shirt he’s wearing.) Not unlike John Baldessari’s classic map of California, which spells out the state’s name with materials gathered from the landscape, Kunath acts as a kind of human semaphore, signaling in vain to an anticipated viewer.

It’s a wonderfully odd work. You don’t immediately decipher the language being acted out; but when you do, the funny little man in the pictures seems only more remote. Loneliness, the passage of time and a yearning to connect are what register.

The strongest work in the show is “About Souffle,” a nearly 33-minute video exploration of the conflict between freedom and isolation, alienation and escape. To the agitated sound of urgent violins, Kunath repeatedly runs from right to left across the visual field. At regular intervals he makes a little leap -- and the scenery changes, as if he’s jumped from one locale into another. Urban, suburban, rural, tropical, populated, desolate -- the scenes range far and wide.

These edits -- literal jump cuts -- don’t always match Kunath’s awkward leaps. The disjunction only adds to the sense of jumpy nervousness in his perpetual flight. A contemporary variation on a traditional theme -- Where do we come from? Where are we going? -- this acutely observed portrait of manic desperation veers between comic and tragic, setting just the right tone.

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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When ordinary becomes intriguing

Photographs with captions get an unexpected spin in a new body of work by New York artist John Miller. Based on a wide variety of information gleaned from Internet dating sites and personal ads, the works juxtapose bits of private information with banal snapshots taken around Los Angeles. Text and image do strange things to each other.

Collectively titled “Total Transparency,” the 15 photo panels at Richard Telles Fine Art don’t grab you by the lapels. Images instead show such mundane things as a kitchen sink, a neighborhood hillside in Echo Park, the interior of a parking garage, a rumpled bed, a gas station, a fenced sidewalk and other innocuous vistas.

Discreetly printed over these pictures are snippets from online personal ads. Typical of the unwitting revelations lurking within casual speech is the announcement “I’m a guy that just ended a long-term relationship. Now it’s time to have some fun!” So much for the joys of love and consanguinity.

Miller’s vernacular juxtapositions empower language over pictures. The words describe or inflect what you see in the images.

Printed over a bucolic roadside scene near Dodger Stadium, the sentence “Fun is only a few keystrokes away” makes the scene reverberate between dreamland and nightmare. Is this a potential site of conjugal bliss in an Arcadian landscape? Or is it the likely scene of an unspeakable act?

And come to think of it, just what does that beat-up beer carton over in the gutter suggest?

Perfectly ordinary snapshots shift gear, becoming irradiated views of kinky love nests, latent crime scenes and secret lairs of hidden desires. Rarely does an ordinary sink full of dirty dishes look so dastardly and mysterious as Miller makes it seem.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.