A lively intellect that bucks the system

Thirty years ago, artists put their faith in systems. Whether mathematical, scientific or philosophical, the idea was to eliminate personal taste so art could stick to the facts, say something truthful and be defended on rational grounds.

Today, systems aren’t what they used to be. Chaos plays a greater role in our understanding of how the world works. Intuition no longer has a bad name. And taste is beginning to make a comeback.

These developments lie behind Steve Roden’s new work. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the artist takes them and runs, creating paintings, drawings and a sound installation that are at once loopy and logical. It’s his best work yet, and among the most memorable exhibitions of the year.

The 13 modestly scaled paintings form the show’s heart and soul. Never measuring more than 2 feet on a side, Roden’s intimate pictures are made up of fractured patterns, geometric eccentricities, overpainted mistakes, drippy washes and diagrammatic doodles.

Most resemble homemade maps to imaginary lands far more fantastic than any on Earth. All are painted in dirty tertiary and vibrant primary colors, with the secondary shades coming in a distant third. The rough-and-tumble surfaces make them look as if they’ve been around the block once or twice and are the wiser for it.

A few appear to have gone to hell in a handbasket -- and come back to talk about it.

The mixes of media that go into each sturdy, linen-covered panel -- including oil, enamel, acrylic, ink, polyurethane, beeswax and glitter -- suggest a witch’s brew of toxins. Despite the scruffy toughness of Roden’s paintings, there’s a delicacy to their marks.

To look closely at these polyglot compositions is to see strings of decisions made by the painter. Such gestures provide ample evidence of a lively mind in action, often pushing itself beyond its comfort zone to discover whatever it can.

It’s a testament to Roden’s intelligence (and his willingness to embrace serendipity) that every painting is different from every other, and that so many are filled with a cornucopia of definitive flourishes. In this they bear comparison to Thomas Nozkowski’s extremely individualistic abstractions, as well as to those by Joyce Lightbody, Ynez Johnston and Franz Ackermann.

Roden’s 5-by-6-foot painting lacks the intimate density and raw elegance of his smaller works. Unlike them, it’s not a unique translation of “The Silent World,” Jacques Cousteau’s first book, but a fanciful riff on “Clay Street,” a 19th century Sunday-school song.

Roden’s eight drawings are visual transcriptions of the chirping of such American songbirds as yellow warblers, black-capped chickadees and red-eyed vireos. His sound installation recycles glass bottles and an old punk cassette, creating lovely background music that sounds like a chorus of electronic crickets or techno wind chimes.

Roden’s paintings, however, provide the long-lasting excitement. The systems they begin with all but disappear in the multilayered process of creation. Their individuality intensified, they give each viewer plenty of room to maneuver in fanciful worlds.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Aug. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Time and space in compression

The Internet has made the world seem smaller than it is. Some even say that computers have led to diminished attention spans.

Ryan Taber’s solo debut at Mark Moore Gallery flies in the face of such folk wisdom. Like digital technology, Taber’s sculptures and drawings shrink time and space, compressing far-flung ages, machines and scales in curiously beautiful works that build on the principles of Cubist collage and Surrealist juxtaposition.

But unlike electronically transmitted information, which traffics in instant gratification and is gone with the touch of a key, Taber’s works stick in the mind’s eye. Their expansiveness draws viewers into worlds that are bigger and more participatory than usual.

Crammed into the corner of a small side gallery is a medieval siege engine, delicately carved from brown foam in 1:8 scale and set on an angular pedestal that would make any Russian Constructivist envious. The business end of Taber’s catapult, affectionately dubbed by its original users “The Witch From Whose Head the Ropes Hang Like Hair,” contains a handcrafted plastic diorama of two rocky peaks that appear in an 1866 landscape painting by William Henry Jackson.

Across the gallery stands a more elaborate pedestal. It supports a 1:24 scale model of a 1963 Volkswagen Microbus. Taber has customized it by adding an HO-scale landscape to the top of the vehicle’s splintered body. Complete with snowcapped peaks, turbulent waterfalls and verdant valleys, the landscape is based on an 1863 painting of the Rocky Mountains by Albert Bierstadt.

Two workmanlike pencil drawings similarly conflate imaginative and bodily transport. One features a Viking ship being excavated from a tropical mountainside under a rainbow in an 1866 painting by Frederic Edwin Church. The other depicts the rusting wreck of a Microbus that has crashed into a ravine in an 1828 Thomas Cole painting.

The eye-catching spectacle and cheeky wit of Taber’s works embody a playful logic that’s a pleasure to contemplate. Raising serious questions about the past’s place in the present -- and our place in the future -- his exhibition artfully navigates its way through the image glut of modern life. Overwhelming incoherence is transformed into weirdly poetic moments.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Aug. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Sculpture seen from within

Installation art often begins with the idea that its pieces are walk-in paintings. In contrast, sculpture rarely aspires to be a room-size composition that lets viewers enter its negative spaces to observe its forms from various perspectives. Jacci Den Hartog’s new work changes all that.

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, each of the five realistic depictions of rivers, harbors and a 21-foot-long seashore makes you feel as if you’re standing in the middle of a picture, from which everything but the water (and a couple of rocky outcroppings) has been deleted. It’s an uncanny sensation, recalling both the visual capabilities of off-the-shelf software and the handcrafted magic of dioramas.

Two of Den Hartog’s abbreviated seascapes rest atop thin steel rods that make the irregularly contoured sculptures appear to float in thin air, their wildly whitecapped surfaces of blue, green and gray water all the more turbulent for being detached from the land.

The three other pieces are affixed to the wall, where they cast shadows that resemble clouds scudding through the sky, upside-down mountain ranges and gracefully twisted bonsai limbs. The shadows add to the dreaminess of Den Hartog’s sculptures, distancing them from the rules of verisimilitude.

Den Hartog has created the sinuous, undulating surfaces by a multi-step process of carving, molding, mixing and casting. To look closely is to see that they abandon the dutiful truthfulness of realism for the fantasy-fueled power of artifice.

In other words, Den Hartog’s gorgeously sculpted waves, splashes and swirls are too good to be true -- and too beautiful to be denied. This links them to grand landscape paintings and Japanese woodblock prints, in which water is stylized and formalized, all for the sake of compositional effect.

Den Hartog even plays with perspective, building spatial recession into some of her works to pump up the drama without overriding the sensuous tranquillity that is becoming her trademark. As an artist she fuses sculpture and picture making, an odd combination of media and genres that she handles as if it were perfectly natural.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Aug. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Grand mystery on a small scale

The alcove between the entrances to the men’s and women’s locker rooms at the downtown YMCA is among the least glamorous places to see art in Los Angeles. But for the last three years, YMCA members Caroline Clerc and Erik Knutzen have been bringing a wide range of first-rate exhibitions to what they call a “micro-gallery.”

Four blocks straight south of the REDCAT Gallery at Disney Hall, SPACE at the YMCA is almost always worth a visit. It has the best hours of any gallery in town (5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays). It’s free. (Nonmembers just have to sign in at the front desk.) And right now its single white wall features three terrific paintings by Dan Connally.

Connally’s rock-solid paintings would hold up in places far less hospitable than this. They’re not shrinking violets. The smell of chlorine doesn’t diminish their effect, which is considerable.

Each measures 20 to 32 inches on a side. Into such compact dimensions, Connally packs so much atmospheric ambiguity that it’s easy to get lost -- to forget what you were looking for because the process of looking became so interesting on its own.

The perceptual pleasures that these quasi-figurative abstractions deliver include more than their fair share of conundrums, which are sometimes frustrating, often maddening, occasionally hilarious and always baffling. His doubt-riddled pictures of perfectly ordinary shapes -- neither landscapes nor still lifes -- make you feel stupid, like a tongue-tied numskull too dumb to decipher what’s right in front of your eyes.

On the other hand, they make language seem too crude a tool to convey life’s mystery. Like Samuel Beckett, Connally walks a fine line between tragedy and comedy. Coloring the experience of both with the shadow of its opposite, his oddly generous works slow you down to a snail’s pace. They recall paintings by Howard Hodgkin, Roy Dowell and Michael Reafsnyder but are ultimately too stubborn to do anything but stand on their own.

SPACE at the YMCA, 410 S. Hope St., (213) 624-2348, through Aug. 8. Daily.