Sober fantasies recall Bosch

In the lower right corner of one of Rigoberto Quintana’s absorbing new paintings at the Couturier Gallery, a man with the head of a boar sits in a small wooden boat. White rays project from his eyes, and smoke fumes from his snout. On a cord around his neck hangs a heart that spews blood, soaking the sandy ground on which the boat sits.

Elsewhere in the painting, a woman’s arm transmutes into flame. The necklace she wears passes through the nose of a giraffe, who stands above a rattlesnake sectioned neatly into thirds. The snake’s rattle is pinched by a purple manta ray-like creature, which has one of its flappy wings wrapped around the elbow of the boar-headed man.

Much, much more transpires in this picture, which measures a modest 16-by-16 inches. Each of the figures and objects in Quintana’s sober fantasies connects in some way to something else, which then drips onto yet another thing or sends ribbons of smoke around something else. Little ecologies form, multiply, intersect.

Quintana constructs these intricately woven fictions out of a wealth of sources -- personal memory, religious symbolism and ritual, art history and more. He practices a kind of psychic cartography, an elaborate accounting of all the dark and exotic places to which his mind travels.

In fact, in an earlier body of work not in this show, Quintana painted such scenes directly onto cement casts of his own skull. He’s taken a more conventional path with these new paintings, in acrylic on linen, but the work is no less wildly inventive.

Hieronymus Bosch is an obvious model here, especially in the carnival-esque cast of hybrid creatures -- part humans with beaks or spiny wings -- that populate the landscapes. The skewed sense of scale also puts insects on par with elephants. An undercurrent of moralism threads through the work too, but it doesn’t take root.

Violence, or at least physical violation, appears regularly, but so do images of harmony, meditation and blessing. Blood and fire might appear destructive at one moment and redemptive the next. If Bosch’s shadow falls over the work, so does that of Surrealism, with its mining of dreams and the unconscious, its tone of outrageous honesty.

Quintana, who was born and trained in Cuba and has lived for the last decade in Puerto Rico, keeps his work fairly free of the specifics of time and place. An airplane shows up in one painting and a gun in another, but for the most part, time in these paintings is vast -- epic time -- and space is less defined by geography than shaped by belief and practice, memory and myth. The action transpires on a single plane, top to bottom, side to side, with quieter gaps filled with vaguely Cubist faceting.

Quintana paints in earthen variants of the primaries -- blood red, the blue of the sea, the yellow of sunlight and fire -- and in a style that’s dense and descriptive but not fussy. Reality, in this allegorical place as much as in its literal counterpart, is fluid and ever in motion. Launched like a pinball through these engrossing paintings, the eye travels the paths Quintana has set, rebounding from one complex snare to another, finding things familiar, strange, comforting and disarming at every step.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 933-5557, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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No fuzz and few feathers at Post

Who wouldn’t want to spend time in an “Empathy Room” or pay a visit to “Sympathy Palace”? Those are the enticing titles of concurrent shows at Post, both described as explorations into the relationships between humans, plants and animals.

Neither show delivers the kind of warm, fuzzy feelings its name suggests. Nor does either generate much thoughtful, compelling commentary.

Laurel Beckman, a CalArts grad and professor at UC Santa Barbara, labels the door of her “Empathy Room” with the letters “ER,” inviting comparison to a site of intensity and immediacy. No such luck. In the bare, dark room, overlapping projections of fish and butterflies spin on the back of the door, in the center of a large, hazy penumbra swirling in the opposite direction. In spite of its title and heady rationale -- posing “inter-species affinities as poignant instances of nature-cultures at work” -- the installation is simplistic, a flimsy realization of an undeveloped concept.

“Sympathy Palace,” a group show curated by Beckman, offers a bit more substance. From afar, the flickering lights and collected natural and urban sounds of Joshua Churchill’s elevator installation beckon with promise and evoke a twinge of displacement. Alisa Ochoa’s photographic “Aura Portraits” reveal little, and Ryan Hill’s gouache drawings are whimsical but uneventful.

Eric Beltz contributes a group of luminous and creepy urban landscape paintings as well as an engaging series of patterned botanical drawings he classifies as “Hypnobotany.” Daniela Arriaga mounts a wonderfully odd, fabricated bear snout like a trophy on the wall, where it drools onto a side table. The handmade vase resting there contains flowers that Arriaga, working in feathers and wire, has made to look like a cross between a celestial phenomenon and an ebullience of fishing lures.

Post, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 488-3379, through Saturday.

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Youth is served melodramatically

Born in New York, raised in Brazil and an L.A. resident for about the last 10 years, Nicolau Vergueiro creates work that, not surprisingly, revels in cultural hybridism. The sculptures and drawings in his mildly engaging debut show at the Golinko Kordansky Gallery quote both visually and verbally from Brazilian and American music.

They also reflect the influence of the Arte Povera movement and its emphasis on humble everyday materials, and they show the marks of Vergueiro’s UCLA and CalArts education, including a fixation on the style of the 1970s. Never mind that the artist was born in 1977, making this nostalgia heavily mediated. What comes through most strongly in his work is youthful melodrama, a self-important exuberance that’s charming if inconsistent.

In a 36-piece wall installation, Vergueiro riffs on the covers of his favorite record albums. He abbreviates their cover art, translating it into line drawings on vinyl (wink, wink), then wraps the vinyl around mirrored tiles arranged in rows. Shiny with adoration, sloppy with enthusiasm, the piece is, like the rest of the work on display, slightly endearing.

Several sculptural pieces on the floor and on pedestals stand like open books or multifold display boards, spilling their contents from both sides. Sewn and stuffed letters pour out, as do cut felt and cork sheeting, broken glass, colored Mylar and tufts of sheepskin. Many of the Brazilian references get lost in translation, but Vergueiro’s strong identification with Pop culture comes through loud and clear.

Golinko Kordansky Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 222-1482, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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‘Heirlooms’ opens a racial dialogue

The seven pieces by Kerry James Marshall on view at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery act as a piquant starter to the feast of issues served in a large museum exhibition of his recent work (“One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics”) traveling the country.

The gallery show is frustratingly small, and the effect of its contents varies widely, but any show of Marshall’s is a welcome opportunity to consider and reconsider assumptions about race, cultural difference, language and power.

“Heirlooms and Accessories,” a trio of large ink-jet prints, anchors the show. It’s a savvy piece of work, a recasting of familiar aspects of history in visual terms that are utterly concise.

As the basis of each print, he uses a well-known 1930 photograph of a double lynching. In the crowd of white onlookers, most stare at the two black men hanging from a tree. Some smile, one points, and several turn away briefly to look at the photographer.

Through digital manipulation, Marshall has isolated three of the women turning back, highlighting their faces and layering over them separate photographic images of jewelry, so that each appears framed within a lovely pendant necklace. They too hang, in a radically different sense.

Their act of witness is itself asserted here as an heirloom, an inheritance. It is a legacy that these women’s families -- and our culture as a whole -- must acknowledge and live with.

Marshall extends the power of these images even further by placing each of the prints in a wide white frame trimmed with rhinestones.

The disjunction between the horrific image and its glitzy treatment is severe. Perversely, the images of accessories to a crime become, themselves, decorative accessories.

Marshall’s other works on view, though provocative, haven’t the same visceral power. But “Heirlooms and Accessories” alone is worth a good long ponder.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.