Chihuly’s delicate garden of blown glass

Of all the reactions likely to be observed among visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art -- quiet contemplation, hushed commentary, a smile or a chuckle -- a genuine gasp is surely among the most rare. Good art can be beautiful, intelligent, humorous or moving, but it takes something pretty spectacular to cut through the refined atmosphere of your typical gallery and evoke a real, spontaneous expression of astonishment.

The glasswork of Dale Chihuly is just such a something and elicited just such a reaction several times on the afternoon I visited his exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, shortly after the opening. Undoubtedly the most famous name in the field of glass blowing today -- the only such name most Americans are likely to recognize -- Chihuly embodies a sort of populism that tends to arouse suspicion in an art world context, where accessibility is all too often associated with superficiality and a lack of sophistication.

The presumption doesn’t hold in this case, however. Far from stalling in the spotlight of popularity, Chihuly’s colorful, oceanic forms appear ever more dynamic, ambitious and virtuosic. The three large-scale installations that make up this exhibition -- each drawn from the artist’s recent “Mille Fiori” series (“a thousand flowers” in Italian) -- are simply dazzling creations, as technically masterful as they are aesthetically graceful. Walking into the gallery’s darkened main space is like walking into an enchanted garden.

An immense, shrub-like mass of curling red and yellow tendrils greets you near the entrance, dominating one end of the low, 16-by-40-foot platform that provides the base for the largest of the installations. Beyond lies a grove of slender, free-standing, blue and lavender stalks, some up to 9 feet tall, scattered among which are several squat, green, yucca-like creations and smooth, globular forms emblazoned with various organic patterns. Another explosion of coiling tendrils -- this primarily yellow and green and roughly the shape of a Christmas tree -- holds down the far end, alongside a cluster of mid-size stems resembling swaying champagne flutes.

The two smaller installations, each about one-third the size of this one, are less extravagant but equally delightful, with a similar repertoire of forms drawn into tighter, more coherent configurations.

One consists primarily of tall, green, slightly curling, grass-like stems and slender yellow flutes with yawning, buttercup mouths. The whole cluster, nestled in the darkest corner of the gallery’s ground floor, seems genuinely alive to the spotlights above, as though unfurling luxuriously in a beam of morning sunlight.

The other work, installed in the open-air patio on the gallery’s second floor, enjoys the actual seaside sunlight of Venice. It responds with an appropriately playful attitude, the dominant form being a slender, hooked stem resembling the head and neck of a swan, festooned in gorgeous green and purple stripes.

The L.A. Louver show is one of two gallery exhibitions mounted to accompany a survey now at Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art. The other, at Frank Lloyd Gallery, contains smaller, individual works dating from the early 1980s through nearly the present day.

Though far humbler in scale than the installations, the works at Frank Lloyd are equally impressive. Elegant and sensual, they are characterized by an innovative manipulation of basic, organic forms and an often breathtaking delicacy.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Jan. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Jan. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Finding an intimate simplicity

In an age of digital photography and video installation, super-graphics and cellphone cameras, the work of Dan McCleary comes as a reminder of the sheer pleasure to be found in a straightforward, handcrafted portrait.

Very little happens in the two dozen drawings, paintings and etchings that make up his exhibition at Carl Berg Gallery. Most of the smaller works are traditional depictions of faces. The others portray a variety of decidedly humble scenarios: a woman painting her fingernails; a man weighing himself; two people in a job interview, and so on. This simplicity is its own reward.

The show begins on an intimate note with three drawings and one small painting hung in a narrow vestibule at the front of the gallery. This is McCleary at his best. The works are tender, eloquent and deeply personal. Each feels like an introduction to an individual one can easily imagine wanting to know.

The etchings in the back room -- a combination of straight portraits and simple scenarios, all part of a series called “Masculine Feminine” -- are equally skillful and similarly inviting.

The paintings in the main gallery, all about 40 inches high by 35 inches wide, feel a step removed by comparison -- stiffer and vaguely artificial. One can’t help but think about how long the models were obliged to hold these poses and wonder if the relative vacancy in their faces isn’t a sort of boredom. They’re inviting works just the same, characterized by a soft, cheerful palette, clear white light and an understated attention to detail.

McCleary’s distinction, one senses, is not only that he really looks at his subjects -- a significant accomplishment in itself -- but that he genuinely loves that process of looking. The result is a portraiture that moves beyond the features to capture the deeper qualities that light a countenance from within.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd...., (323) 931-6060, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Insight through humorous details

Judging from the length of her bio, which lists more than 40 solo shows since the completion of her graduate degree in 1988, San Diego-based artist Jean Lowe has been busy. Her exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, “The Loneliness Clinic,” follows close on the heels of last year’s “Empire Style,” at the same gallery, but betrays little sign of exhaustion or redundancy.

The format remains more or less the same; both involve mock interiors fabricated entirely in Lowe’s signature papier-mache. But the milieu presents an altogether different set of issues.

“Empire” proposed an 18th-century French salon as a lens through which to view our own relationship to art, nature and landscape. “The Loneliness Clinic” re-creates a present-day psychiatrist’s office, to poke fun at the elaborate and often misguided ways in which we go about attempting to understand ourselves.

The show’s insight is in its humor and its humor in its details: the titles of the books on the bookshelves (“The Complete Guide to Insider Trading,” “Sex After 16: Rekindling the Flame”); the headlines on the covers of magazines in the waiting room (Psychology: “Tough Love and Your Elderly Parents”; Good Housekeeping: “How to Escape from Quicksand”); and the especially entertaining “Doctors Notes,” recorded on papier-mache notepads, which hang individually in the back room of the gallery.

“Pt. has a smarmy familiarity w/ diagnostic words and phrases,” reads one pad. “Unbelievable banality! Unable (unwilling) to be self-reflective,” reads another, alongside three examples of explicitly sexual doodling and a note to “buy popcorn!!”

Sharp and deliciously witty, the notes comprise a curious sort of portrait gallery. They’re exaggerated enough to laugh at, yet (like all good parody) familiar enough to be discomfiting.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B4, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Of nostalgia and subculture

The statement that accompanies Mike Pare’s exhibition of drawings at Mark Moore Gallery is a casually assembled, lackadaisically punctuated and curiously entertaining document, three pages in length, in which one finds the Brooklyn-based artist not so much explaining his ideas as circling inquisitively around them. He weaves shreds of insight together as he goes.

The 1960s, punk rock, youth, subculture, nostalgia -- these are his subjects. The image in which they culminate -- and which serves as the basis for most of the drawings -- is that of a crowd or an audience. “Nothing is a louder spectacle,” he writes, “than the odd image of a landscape made of people.”

Several of the drawings portray crowds, presumably found in 1960s photographs: a dozen or more people languidly watching something outside the frame. Others portray what look like punk rock mosh pits, with young, mostly male bodies jostling violently against one another. Both sets are overlaid in places with psychedelic colors and icons.

The ideas that animate the statement do float through the works, lending the show a persuasive sense of promise: Pare is onto something interesting. For just that reason, however, one wishes he would have taken a little more trouble with drawing itself, which is quick, indelicate, inarticulate and ultimately not very interesting.

The mosh pit images fare the better of the two, in part because the heaviness of Pare’s pencil retains a shade of thematic significance, reflecting the aggressive commotion of the scene.

A refinement of technique, however, would take the work a long way toward articulating the degree of nuance that emerges, however ramblingly, in the written statement. As it is, the drawings leave us on the surface of images we’ve all essentially seen before.

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Dec. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.