Art that’s instantly gratifying

Takashi Murakami’s art acts as quickly and succinctly as a corporate logo in delivering a concise visual identity. That’s no glib comparison. Murakami was an emerging artist less than a decade ago, a start-up. Now his career is an exercise in global marketing, his work a trademark brand riding on the coattails of Disney, Warhol and Pokemon.

The Blum & Poe Gallery, an early importer of Murakami’s work to the U.S., now features a large show of his paintings, sculpture and videos. To see it is to be dazzled by its slick surfaces and sucked in by its decorative exuberance and relentlessly upbeat charm. It’s art of the moment, art of instant gratification and amusement.

But the show, like Murakami’s work in general, also entails a test. It forces you to grapple with the dividing line between art and merchandising.

To meet the work on its own terms means erasing that line once and for all. Drawing from older forms of Japanese art, comics and animation, Murakami has developed an inventory of motifs and characters that he continues to recycle and expand.

Stylized eyeballs are a constant. Alone and in clusters, fringed with sporty sprigs of lashes, they float like bubbles across a sparkly black ground in a series of paintings. They also adorn a variety of small fiberglass sculptures, simple round balls and bulbous shapes with protruding knobs (“Water Chestnuts”).

Larger sculptures feature childlike characters with huge heads and innocent expressions. One of them, a life-size, boyish self-portrait, travels with an equally cute canine companion. The treacle quotient runs pretty high here, but work revolving around one of Murakami’s new characters, Inochi, offsets some of the sweetness.

Inochi means “life” in Japanese, and Murakami uses the character, a high-tech mutant of a boy with a massive E.T.-like head, to examine the zigzag of emotions that life generates. In a photographic poster, Inochi stands alone beneath blossoming cherry trees. In another, he sits by himself in his schoolroom, gazing at a globe. Both posters carry texts expounding on the wondrous joy of life and love.

In an accompanying live-action DVD, a computer-generated Inochi interacts with his preteen peers, among whom being alive means experiencing humiliation, gastric distress and sexual confusion. For Inochi, life settles out as something of a vexed gift.

The art doesn’t really settle anywhere. The posters read like odd Hallmark outtakes. The DVD segments resemble promotional spots, complete with a singsong jingle.

Another DVD, this one animated, riffs on an “Alice in Wonderland” theme. Instead of falling down a rabbit hole, this little girl goes in after her cellphone when it gets swallowed by a giant cartoonish panda. She has a psychedelic trip through zero-gravity spirals and tunnels, while eyeballs, pretty patterns and Louis Vuitton logos swirl by. As it turns out, the magic all takes place in a Vuitton store.

Whether the girl was playing out a private fantasy driven by her good old-fashioned imagination or succumbing to a retailer’s fancy stagecraft is a moot question in Murakami’s work. The products of his own imagination are just that -- products. He’s designed purses for Vuitton and merchandised his art at every point on the commercial spectrum, selling everything from one-of-a-kind objects to mass-produced toys.

Murakami gets billing as “artist/producer/creative director” on a large panel with the feel of film credits, filled as it is with small-print names of assistants and fabricators. His workshops -- in Brooklyn, Paris and outside Tokyo -- turn out the goods to impeccable technical standards, whether or not the artist (who divides his time between Japan and the U.S.) is present. The romantic vision of the artist as solitary genius this ain’t.

But there have been artists before Murakami who’ve maintained workshops, called their production centers “factories” and created art in absentia. The job description of artist has become elastic enough to encompass just about anything, and Murakami simply treats it like the taffy that it is -- stretching it, pulling it, folding it in on itself. He is brilliant, but it’s his marketing savvy, more than the meager vision of his art, that makes him a star.

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through June 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Making Pamela Anderson boring

The five books on Pamela Anderson’s current reading list have to do with cultivation of the spirit. Most of her other favorite titles -- according to her website, which of course allows for digital enhancement of all kinds -- focus on forgiveness, evil, wisdom and the soul. She writes too -- columns for Jane and a few other magazines.

The “Baywatch” babe is an international icon, sizzling sweet eye candy. But she’s also a fascinating phenomenon, a walking fusion of the classic Madonna/whore dichotomy, a down-to-earth mom on 8-inch stilettos, a wholesome vegan on the cover of this month’s Playboy. She’s ripe material for commentary, so it’s surprising and disappointing that an exhibition staged in her honor turned out so dry.

Curated by Mery Lynn McCorkle for the Dirt Gallery, “Stacked: Homage to Pamela Anderson” isn’t nearly racy, wild or funny enough to do its subject justice. It does offer a few good chuckles, though.

“Hubba Bubba,” Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand’s photograph of two voluminous pink chewing gum bubbles pressed together, cleavage-style, makes for a snappy one-liner. Barbara Schreiber’s cute, cartoonish little paintings put things in perspective: Each features a massive breast overshadowing whatever’s going on behind it -- war, politics, religion. Alison Foshee contributes a sweet tribute in the form of a nautilus shell crafted of fake fingernails, painted pink and adorned with decals of palm trees and hibiscus blossoms.

Granted, there’s a lot of surface to cover with the subject of this show. But that’s no excuse for simply skimming over it.

Dirt Gallery, 7906 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 822-9359, through Aug. 21. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

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Unfolding slowly and purposefully

Ron Rizk’s been at it a long time, painting still lifes that are crafty in all the best senses. His newest paintings at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery are cunning and technically impressive as ever, engrossing on multiple levels.

The surface appeal kicks in first, and it would take a mighty effort to resist Rizk’s meticulous illusionism. A longtime professor at USC, he’s adopted strategies from several historical schools of still-life painting, including Dutch and Spanish, but especially 19th century American.

Extrapolating from the basic function of the surface as receptacle for paint, Rizk turns each of his panels -- through the magic of trompe l’oeil -- into a niche or shelf for objects of believable heft and timeworn texture. Some are made to look like stages for theatrical tableaux, vehicles for Rizk’s own skilled performance.

In the paintings, narrative elements present themselves in piecemeal fashion, like stones forming a path across a river. In the more literal-minded pictures, Rizk guides us from one bank neatly to the other; but the most interesting ones leave us happily stranded in the middle, savoring the view.

Rizk favors subjects that make reference to the activity of making itself -- tools of building, crafting, seeing and amusement. In “Before Hubble,” he sets a pair of opera glasses on a windowsill, aimed at the full moon.

In other images, he features handmade toys, woodworking tools, a picture of a steam locomotive. Using an anachronistic palette of sallow blues, flat greens and browned-out reds, Rizk composes these pictures like odes to an era of greater resourcefulness.

Everything about them, from their obsolete subjects to their traditional style of realism, is a respectful bow to the past. How refreshing indeed to experience work that celebrates the slow and purposeful -- and rewards those same qualities in a viewer.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-9843, through Saturday.

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Showing the power of synergy

New work by young L.A. painter Violet Hopkins at the Golinko Kordansky Gallery illustrates well the concept of synergy. In each ink and watercolor painting, representational imagery fuses with abstraction. The effect surpasses the simple sum of those two parts.

The ostensible subjects of Hopkins’ paintings are plants and animals. She renders a stand of birch trees, a plot of mushrooms, a sparrow in its nest and iguanas on rocks with admirable ability, though not abundant flair. Surrounding these descriptive passages are fluid patches and pools of color bleeding into one another.

These too are lovely, but they don’t have enough structure or verve to stand on their own any better than the representational areas. Where the two come together, however, sparks fly.

The meeting, though it takes place quite visibly, has a seamless mystery to it. Short, descriptive dashes grow lax and languid. Strokes used to build volume assert depth, and articulated contours sneak away like sly teenagers testing their freedom.

Solid turns to liquid the way clarity gives way to blur in a photograph with shallow depth of field. Within the representational areas, Hopkins covers most of the paper with paint to complete the illusion of form. In the surrounding spaces, the white paper claims as much attention as the saturated color on it -- the drips of deep russet and streaks of iridescent green.

Hopkins plays with the practice of camouflage here. The animals depicted blend into their landscapes, just as realism embeds itself in abstraction. It’s a survival strategy for the creatures. Perhaps it’s not much different for the artist, whose instinct to thrive leads to cannily balancing the sweet and the smart, the safety of the middle and the riskiness of the edge.

Golinko Kordansky Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 222-1482, through Saturday.