It’s always marching on

Time flies. It crawls. It ticks away. It permeates our experience but resists our influence.

We read the effects of time in the mirror every morning, then spend our days racing against it. It’s a phenomenal force, elusive yet comprehensible from multiple, equally viable perspectives. Although far more nuanced than the alarm clock’s ring, William Smith’s new paintings at Jan Baum Gallery similarly usher in a new stage of alertness to time.

They set the mind abuzz with fresh takes on the familiar and assumed. Time’s dual nature as abstract and concrete generates a frisson that plays itself out captivatingly in the Philadelphia-based artist’s work. The show, Smith’s third at the gallery in five years, is his best.

As in earlier work, Smith combines landscape imagery with texts and diagrams from books from the 18th and 19th centuries. Many works are sized to a single book page. A painting of trees and sky might cover all of the text but for a page heading or a snippet of words left exposed.

One lovely piece, painted on a page with the heading “Of the Division of Time” (also the show’s title), presents a view down into a body of water. The pond or lake reflects a tall dark tree and ripples gently, stirring a scattering of floating leaves. There’s already some delectable spatial ambiguity in a view like this that layers palpable and reflected subjects, but Smith tweaks it further. Among the leaves painted on the water’s surface are six leaf shapes left unpainted, exposing the book page beneath and its table identifying the dates of new moons.

Smith’s work has a temporal depth as intellectually stimulating as it is gorgeous. He paints the landscape using a palette of nostalgia, strong in umbers and veiled by what reads as aging varnish. In “The Velocity of Light,” a larger painting, Smith again positions us just above a body of water, looking down into it from the dense darkness of surrounding foliage. The flattened perspective is slightly destabilizing, and Smith makes much of this lack of fixity.

He rarely offers a horizon as visual life raft to get our bearings, and he plays up the contrast between humid shadows and bleached sunlight, abstracting the scene even further. The water, a continuous body flowing diagonally through the scene, shifts dramatically from blue to white to pale pink, as if several rivers in one.

A few circles the size of quarters and half-dollars are left unpainted, interrupting the continuity of the landscape to reveal printed pages beneath. One of these little telescopic peeks shows an engraving of foliage, another a diagram of a spherical body half in light, half in shadow. A third shows a rendering of a skull beside a lantern -- a reminder of mortality, sneaked in to compound the evocations of time’s significance.

Smith works in layers, and with the idea of layers -- ravishing beauty atop scientific rationality, speculation, memory and imagination. In one spectacular work he paints an exquisite botanical parade of poppies, irises and dandelions passing over a long horizontal swath of old book pages, the texts dealing with the nature of light and atmosphere, and the distances of the planets.

Time is a force to be reckoned with emotionally, scientifically, historically, viscerally, aesthetically. Smith’s paintings remind us of that manifold challenge and its elusive ends while allowing us to luxuriate in the certain beauty of earth and sky that surrounds us.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 932-0170, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Providing a potion for what ails you

The art of personal display threads through more than two decades of Diane Gamboa’s work -- from early photographs of L.A.’s punk scene to performances with the Conceptual art collective ASCO and her line of disposable paper fashions. Her prints and paintings feature men and women adorned with tattoos and body jewelry.

In her recent paintings at Tropico de Nopal, that trademark Gamboa verve is everywhere in evidence. Angular-jawed men and taut-bodied women sit among candles and incense, stern and sexy curanderos, practitioners of folk medicine. They’re tattooed and pierced, beaded and chained. They wear their hair in extravagant styles, like Mesoamerican headdresses.

Gamboa treats the canvases themselves like skins under a tattoo artist’s needle, laying in designs in strong black lines. Underpainted in red with a brushy whitewash topcoat between the lines, the images have the flatness, immediacy and legibility of good graphic art. There’s a sameness to the pitch of the work, but it’s Gamboa’s own -- shrill yet charming, decorative but tough.

Violence seems to linger around the edges of these scenes, while their ostensible subject is healing rituals and practices of faith. The mildly jarring combination ends up being more amusing than anything else, and Gamboa seems to be after smiles.

She titles the show “Bruja-ha,” meaning witch, with an echoing laugh, and sets up a pseudo-botanica alongside the show. The potions and candles on sale are labeled with maladies, mostly. But in keeping with Gamboa’s barbed sense of humor, it’s not clear whether the products are meant to cure them or induce them.

Tropico de Nopal Gallery, 1665 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 481-8112, through July 11. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

*

Exploring a new neighborhood

Viewing Adia Millett’s new work at Cherrydelosreyes Gallery amounts to roaming an unfamiliar neighborhood at night, peering into windows, attempting to make sense of the occupants, shaping stories around their lives. The main gallery space is darkened for the show. In the center of the room stands a large platform, about waist-high, that holds eight miniature housing units in two neat rows.

Their walls of tiny brick look shabby, stained and darkened by time, and the forest green paint on their doors and window frames is chipped. It’s an affecting, convincing sight, enacting that sense of physical transport so brilliantly realized in the environments of Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and Michael McMillen.

The literal gives way to the metaphorical once our attention turns to the interiors. Oozing wallpaper and strange tableaux bring to mind the creepy hotel set of “Barton Fink.”

One room looks like a medical facility gone bad. Its industrial sink sits abandoned in the corner, and the white tiled floor and walls are smeared with grime.

In another an illuminated globe sits on the floor, surrounded by a few dozen tiny rabbit figurines. A dining table with peeling varnish and a single chair stand in the center of another particularly poignant space. On the table rest a miniature poinsettia plant, wrapped for gift giving, and an unreasonably long row of shiny spoons. Nine bare lightbulbs, hung at staggered heights, illuminate the room.

Millett, a CalArts graduate living in New York, also shows a series of color photographs of these interiors. A few are intriguing, but the sculptural installation is far more potent.

It’s a sophisticated variant of dollhouse play, the creation (or re-creation) of a world, a culture, latent with commentary on what’s wrong with the one we already occupy. Each of these little homes is like a provocative hint that we can extrapolate from.

The limited view and incomplete access to what’s inside act as enticements, inducements to shape those stories in our minds. Millett lays it on a bit thick in her titles (“Pre-Fabricated Innocence of a Civil Union: Reproduction,” for example); it’s already clear enough from the visceral power of the work how tightly bound physical and conceptual realities are. A small quibble for a very impressive debut.

Cherrydelosreyes Gallery, 12611 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 398-7404, through July 11. Closed Mondays through Thursdays.

*

Deftly utilizing forms of light

Patti Oleon calls her new paintings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art “Light Fiction,” and the description may be more apt even than she intended. The works are fictive (as all paintings inherently are) and light prevails as both subject and form, so the term is a clean fit.

But it’s also slightly dismissive, and that sense of the term applies here too. The paintings aren’t as frothy as beach novels, but they’re not “Ulysses,” either.

Scenes of elegant interiors bathed in light, they abound in small, beautiful passages and acute observations. They don’t expand or redefine the genre but work modestly within it.

Oleon, based in San Francisco, paints places made for public delectation -- hotel lobbies and period rooms in museums, grandly appointed with velvet upholstery, ornate moldings and crystal chandeliers. Emptied of people, the rooms feel hushed, frozen.

The sole sense of presence is provided by light -- the warm glow from a wall sconce or, more often, sunlight bursting through the edges of a window or door frame with brilliant white intensity. Oleon makes smart use of warm/cool contrasts and blue/orange complementary tonalities to make her compositions hum.

She renders the bright sheen of sunlight on slick wood floors with agility and revels in the ordinary magic that light practices all around us, turning familiar forms into abstract conglomerations of shapes and shadows. Her work draws upon a rich heritage of light-oriented painting, bringing to mind the stillness and staging of Vermeer and the meditative luminosity of Rothko. She holds back from their depth and inventiveness, however, opting instead to keep things light.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through July 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.