A history lesson, from designer items

An exhibition of more than 100 chairs, tables, shelves, beds, lamps, cabinets, bowls, vases and other household items makes the Beverly Hills branch of the Gagosian Gallery look like a high-end version of IKEA. But this stunning showcase of designer items, organized in conjunction with Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris, is far more than that.

It’s a time capsule that whisks visitors to an era when the best and brightest architects and designers not only worked on exclusive commissions for the superrich but also put their talents toward the invention and fabrication of reasonably priced items that served utilitarian purposes for folks from all walks of life. The engaging array of well-used and beautifully preserved objects, titled “Charlotte Perriand/Jean Prouve: 20th Century Furniture and Architecture,” is a history lesson in the guise of a store.

Although everything is for sale, you don’t need a fat bank account to grasp what the designers of these optimistic, unpretentious objects believed in or to appreciate the profound influence they had on American artists (particularly the Minimalists, whose works are on view in a fine exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art).

The majority of the streamlined furniture was designed and built by Jean Prouve (1901-84), an avant-garde metalworker who opened his own workshop in 1923 and went on to design buildings, and Charlotte Perriand (1903-99), an inventive furniture and interior designer known for her sleek forms, often constructed with copper and steel. From 1927 to 1937, Perriand worked with architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in a collaboration that led to the development of their often-imitated tubular steel furniture.

All but a handful of the works in this show were made in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Three sun shutters by Prouve, which once shaded the windows of Parisian high-rises, now function as room dividers, breaking the main gallery into more domestically scaled spaces. The industrial-scale louvers, made of unpainted steel and aluminum, resemble the wings and tail fins of airplanes. They contribute to the aerodynamic atmosphere, which complements the no-nonsense, stripped-to-the-basics sensibility of the show as a whole.

On one side, a graceful sideboard by Perriand, exquisitely crafted from exotic woods, stands out among three communal tables, one for a library. Designed solely by Perriand or in collaboration with Prouve, their simple forms, less glamorous materials and straightforward, show-the-bolts construction celebrate everyday functionalism without sacrificing anything in the way of elegance.

On the other side, nine chairs Prouve designed by himself or with Perriand display the designers’ skills with materials. Using carved wood, metal, leather, canvas and molded plywood with extraordinary deftness, they fuse beauty and utility in ordinary objects that seem to have one-of-a-kind personalities. From the casual elegance of some low-slung numbers to the fireplug toughness of others and the prim simplicity of still others, the designers show themselves to be as sensitive to nuance as any artist.

Upstairs, the furniture from a dormitory room designed by Perriand and Le Corbusier is arranged against the back wall. Putting a priority on affordable efficiency and journeyman durability, the pieces include a blackboard, bed, chairs, stool, table, sconce and ingenious room divider, which doubles as a bookshelf, cabinet and closet.

Throughout the three-room exhibition, sexy, breast-shaped lamps by Serge Mouille, small ebony sculptures, ashtrays and plates by Alexandre Noll and sensuous vases and bowls by Georges Jouve add homey touches. Although everything here is well on its way to becoming an antique, the aggregation still speaks eloquently to the present, particularly in terms of the marriage of quality and affordability.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through June 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Giving voice and video to sculpture

I can’t remember the last time I glimpsed a work of art that caused me to pick up the pace of my walk toward it. The opposite happens far more frequently, recalling Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” when she tells Toto to run.

Tony Oursler’s new sculptures stand out from the crowd because they actually get you excited about looking at them. That should be too obvious to mention, but it’s worth saying because so much work these days is based on the assumption that art is good for you and -- like cauliflower or rutabagas -- isn’t meant to be all that pleasurable.

Oursler never presumes that his talking, video-enhanced sculptures are good for anything. Indeed, part of their power resides in the fact that they might be follies -- distracting traps as addictive and unwholesome as television.

Installed in three dimly lighted rooms of the Margo Leavin Gallery, Oursler’s five free-standing sculptures are bulbous blobs of white fiberglass onto which he projects videos of human eyes and mouths. All create the impression that viewers are coming face to face with self-conscious characters.

“Boz” is a waist-high lump whose larger-than-life eyes are misaligned. They don’t move in unison, instead opening, closing and looking every which way on their own. The Frankenstein-like figure’s skin is covered with rainbow-tinted blotches. This suggests glitches in both internal, cognitive transmissions and external, electronic ones.

A nearby speaker emits a male voice. Its tone is patient, almost serene. You get the sense that “Boz” believes he’s got all the time in the world to communicate with viewers -- that he’s dumb enough to think that a viewer will stick with him through thick and thin.

But the balance of power tips in your favor: You’re free to leave Oursler’s nose-less creature stuck in its dark corner. There’s a whiff of futility, even borderline desperation, about it. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, the malformed mutant compresses a cornucopia of soulful emotions into a compact package of off-the-shelf technology and theatrical artistry.

“Egot” is a soft-spoken, gold-skinned female whose head is shaped like a deflated beach ball. Wide-eyed and earnest, she recites an endless string of words with roots in stream-of-consciousness literature, Dada poetry and newspaper headlines.

One branch of “Egot’s” family tree can be traced back to the socially engaged work of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. The other goes back to Andy Kaufman and Jabba the Hutt.

Oursler’s eight collages and three flat wall-sculptures are less captivating than his more ambitious floor works, which include a doe-eyed ditz, a pair of conjoined twins and an angry patriot that resembles a Picasso painting come to life. None speaks loudly, so you have to get close and listen carefully.

Such passive-aggressive power plays are effective. It’s hard to escape the feeling that you’ve come before a chorus of oracles filled with all sorts of enigmatic wisdom.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Collages that act like oil on canvas

Tony Berlant’s new works turn the world inside out. And that’s just the beginning.

At the L.A. Louver Gallery, 14 medium-sized pieces look like collages but behave like paintings. Made from cut-up cookie tins and other bits of painted metal affixed to wood panels with thousands of the tiny nails cobblers use, each of Berlant’s patiently wrought assemblages is as fluid and nuanced as any oil on canvas.

Although the veteran L.A. artist uses shears, hammers and planks of wood rather than paint, brush and canvas, the results are so supple and delicate that it’s difficult not to think of his creations as gracefully painted pictures. It’s even harder to say just what they depict.

Abstraction and representation fight to a draw in Berlant’s exceptionally precise pictures of curiously indescribable things. About a third resemble landscapes -- from the sunbaked, Joshua tree-dotted high desert of “Full Court” to the leaf-littered forest ground of “Morongo” and the rocky river bottom of “Untitled Romance.”

Berlant’s landscapes are never still. Every square inch writhes with vitality: Eyes, fur and skin come into focus where vegetable and mineral life seem to belong. In this hallucinatory world, the environment is not just a living organism -- it’s a slumbering, flesh-and-blood giant that pulses and throbs with awe-inspiring mystery.

Some of Berlant’s works have the presence of traditional abstractions. The complex spaces woven together in “Zona Rosa” and the hard-won tranquillity of “Within” leave viewers free to contemplate the silent poetry of texture, shape, line and color, all masterfully orchestrated by the artist’s singular and long-practiced eye-hand coordination.

The rest of the works occupy a vague territory between 2-D abstractions and 3-D landscapes. They’re the most fascinating. And the hardest to wrap your mind around.

“Virgin Ground” initially appears to depict a fecund field aglow with golden grasses. But the more closely you look, the more uncertain you become about what’s right in front of your eyes. The painting’s shapes shift to resemble coral reefs, sandy beaches, moonlit lakes and star-studded night skies.

“Nocturne” takes visitors into the bowels of the Earth, where molten lava burbles impossibly amid icy glaciers and distant vistas of the cosmos.

“Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” is the longest, most panoramic picture. It makes your mind do flip-flops trying to decide whether the image looks out at the world or turns inward, into otherwise invisible nooks and crannies of consciousness. This is where Berlant is at his best, inviting viewers to turn introspective journeys into expansive explorations of spaces that extend far beyond ourselves.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Inaugural exhibit focuses on pink

Pink isn’t one of the colors in an eight-pack of Crayola crayons. It is the name of a stylish rock ‘n’ roller with a taste for soft colors, loud music and pants that were once called hip-huggers.

It’s also the inaugural exhibition at the Cartelle Gallery, a new space in Marina del Rey run by three recent graduates of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. Its two dozen works, by 20 mostly young Los Angeles artists, share a bubblegum-pink palette.

It’s a silly idea for a show. But silliness may never have looked more sumptuous, sexy and, sometimes, surprisingly sophisticated.

Candace Nycz’s 6-by-7-foot painting bathes the main gallery in liquid light, its translucent pink and blue brushstrokes dissolving the canvas into a pool of deliciousness.

The sleek surface of Andy Moses’ horizontal painting ripples with the menacing energy of an electrical storm. And Jimi Gleason’s opaque layers of hot pinks and molten gold, buffed to a dazzling shine, deliver a jolt of optical sizzle.

If spaceships had racing stripes, they might resemble Robert Acuna’s “Boing Boing Boing,” a square panel tightly packed with Pop punch and buoyant linear maneuvers.

Good old-fashioned collage lies behind works by Hunter Woo, Kara Hamer and Vinh Bui, who update that cut-and-paste approach by combining it with Pop art’s giddy rigor.

Tim Bavington’s spray-painted stripe painting makes queasy bedfellows of olive drab and pastel pink. Something similar transpires in Peter Lodato’s “Rose et Vert,” where deep forest greens play off cotton-candy fluffiness.

The exhibition’s unfussy inclusiveness makes room for artists as different as Scott Grieger and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, who taught a good number of the younger painters. It’s a pleasure to see a show so focused on pleasure -- and so smart about it.

Cartelle Gallery, 310 Washington Blvd., Suite 119, Marina del Rey, (310) 574-9689, through May 29. Closed Mondays.