Not just divided but violently ripped apart

Kevin Appel’s new paintings depict a world so fractured that it’s hard to imagine the damage ever being repaired. Psychological trauma and social unrest ripple across the smooth surfaces of his canvases, revealing the artist to be a sharp-eyed Realist whose uncompromising work is all the stronger for being metaphorical and suggestive.

Appel made a name for himself seven years ago with impeccably painted pictures of imaginary midcentury homes afloat in ethereal settings. In 2002, he abandoned the stylish idealism of Modernist architecture and the squeaky-clean functionalism of streamlined design for the depiction of unfinished cabins set in icy-white forests. Raw anxiety and gut-tightening dread percolate beneath the deceptively antiseptic surfaces of those loaded paintings, suggesting a diabolical alliance between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Unabomber.

Appel’s new paintings at the Angles Gallery dive deeper into the potential for violence -- both natural and otherwise -- that defines a nation gripped by fear and driven by the desire to obliterate terrorism. Stretched taut over wood panels, each canvas depicts one, two or three little cabins that appear to have been uprooted by a hurricane and hurled through the sky before crash-landing in trees whose thick limbs have been broken.

Some of the least damaged structures appear to be treehouses made by people far more desperate than the Swiss Family Robinson. Others are so shattered they recall newspaper photos of plane wrecks (not to mention the exploded space shuttle). Still others are the visual equivalent of family trees whose various branches have been feuding for generations.

As for art, Appel’s works recall Synthetic Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Diego Rivera, as well as Philip Guston’s images of densely packed piles of detritus. Gordon Matta-Clark, who dissected real buildings scheduled for demolition, haunts Appel’s art, as do Nancy Rubins’ gargantuan sculptures made of small airplane parts, water heaters, mattresses and trailer homes. In all, beauty and destruction are too close for comfort.

The most apposite real-life precedent for Appel’s paintings may be President Lincoln’s speech about America being a house torn asunder by the Civil War. Both sober assessments counterbalance unimaginable tragedy with battle-scarred optimism.

The blunt-force trauma that Appel’s paintings make palpable is not the whole story. He crafts his canvases with consummate care and labor-intensive devotion, building their compositions with considerable delicacy, unassuming felicity and formal sophistication. Their circle-the-wagons atmosphere attests to a type of go-it-alone defiance made famous by all types of survivors, both real and mythical.

Like the work of many talented artists -- including Monique Prieto, Michael Minelli and Evan Holloway -- that once seemed as if it had little to do with contemporary social issues, Appel’s poignant pictures engage politics indirectly. They lay out their argument about what’s at stake while giving viewers the freedom to make up our own minds.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday. anglesgallery@aol.com

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A Californian’s links to Cubism

A terrific little exhibition of drawings by Lee Mullican (1919-98) picks up on the side of Cubism that gets downplayed in textbooks. According to standard accounts, Cubism happened when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso started painting still lifes and portraits that included multiple perspectives.

But if you look closely at their most ambitious works from 1911 to 1914, it’s clear that they were not merely depicting objects by presenting front, side and back views. That’s what mug shots do.

Cubism went way beyond that, transforming the world of static objects into swirling force fields that behave more like atomic particles than things we could hold in our hands. After 1914, however, Braque and Picasso turned away from this radically abstract side of Cubism, emphasizing instead tactility, the sensuality of matter and the pleasure of decorative patterns.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 29 small drawings Mullican made between 1940 and 1996 reveal the California artist’s stylistic links to the most advanced aspects of Cubism. The earliest works also attest to the influence of Surrealism, with fragmented figures, abstract fish forms, floating eyes and even traces of Minotaur horns making obligatory appearances.

In the 1950s, such recognizable imagery disappears from Mullican’s art. It is replaced by delicately drawn petroglyphs piled atop one another to form lacy palimpsests and by fine, gracefully rendered lines that recall weather charts, battle plans and contour maps. Motion and speed come to the forefront. Hourglass-shaped marks, made with quick twists of the wrist, resemble tiny fulcrums or single points in time upon which big events pivot.

In the 1960s, vertical elements that look like miniature baseball bats, exclamation points or chromosomes create pulsating rhythms. In the 1970s, the organic tans, grays and red-browns Mullican had favored give way to such festive tints as raspberry, mint and periwinkle, making for works that convey joy, abundance and splendor.

In the 1980s, Mullican subjected these plump forms to greater pressure, squeezing nervous tension into funnel-like foci and sharp saw-toothed shapes. By the 1990s, everything dissolved into humming light -- soft yellow and pale blue orbs suffused with serenity.

The visible world plays no part in Mullican’s abstract drawings. But the emotions they elicit are nothing if not worldly: seasoned, sophisticated and acutely aware of the big picture.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, L.A., (323) 933-9911, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. marcselwynfineart.com

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Doodle daydreams tour the world

Mari Eastman’s new paintings take viewers back to junior high school, where precocious preteens fill the margins of notebooks with dreamy images of fantasy-fueled reveries. At the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, these pretty acrylics on canvas and paper, which are sprinkled with glitter and adorned with lines drawn in ballpoint pen, then transport you to China, Versailles and Italy, as well as Baghdad, Vietnam and the American countryside. On the whirlwind tour, horses frolic, bombs fall, a black bear slouches through the woods, a hotel burns and a rushing river cascades into a crystal-blue pool.

That’s an impressive travelogue, especially since it includes ancient China, Renaissance Europe and the contemporary world in which we all live, like it or not. Eastman makes the trip believable because her landscapes, interiors, street scenes and still lifes are more than faux naive exercises in saccharine-sweet nostalgia or slacker-style excuses for messy paint handling. Most are thoughtfully composed and painted with just the right blend of casual offhandedness and homegrown skill.

Some are so insistently girlie that they come off as shrill declarations. More often than not, these are the smallest works. The size of notebook pages, they convey cramped awkwardness.

Eastman’s medium-size and large works let her strut her stuff more freely. These loosely brushed works depict a waterfall, a songbird on a porcelain plate, a palace’s fresco, a garden fountain, a glass-walled sunroom -- hightlighting the nearly magical ways that light suffuses acrylic pigment. In Eastman’s hands, such painterly deftness recalls a Sunday painter’s luckiest moments, when the watercolors behave far better than one could ever have wished. Her unpretentious pictures also recall paintings by Kim Dingle and Raoul Dufy, which suggest that making a mistake is nothing to fret about. Sometimes, the carefully sprinkled glitter enhances the earnestness of Eastman’s works; at others it provides just the right touch of insouciance.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday. info@ karynlovegrovegallery.com

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Abstractions that seem freeze-dried

In the early days of photography, many cameramen wanted their works to have the respectability of painting. Today, the tables have turned.

A good number of painters now want their works to be as accessible and legible as photographic reproductions. A type of freeze-dried abstraction is the dispiriting consequence, with works too cautiously hands-off to deliver the thrills and satisfactions of slow-brewed, long-fermented paintings.

At the Patrick Painter Gallery, eight abstract canvases by Bernard Frize fall into this category. Playing photography against gestural abstraction, these tasteful, polite and eminently reasonable works serve up some perfectly respectable pleasures. But they take too few risks to convince viewers that they are much more than designer versions of old-fashioned “process painting” -- filtered through Roy Lichtenstein’s hand-painted pictures of larger-than-life-size brushstrokes.

Think of it this way: If Sol LeWitt and Morris Louis had collaborated, they might have produced works that look like Frize’s. From LeWitt, the Frenchman takes the idea that setting up a system and following it through to the end is the best way to make art. From Louis, he borrows the idea that a painting is all about the way it is made, each shape true to the materials and decisions that went into its creation.

Too many other artists -- including Pia Fries, Peter Hopkins, James Nares and David Reed -- have taken similar tactics far further than Frize. And while there’s always room for Mannerist abstraction, when this approach prefers tried-and-true conventions to exaggerated extremes, it falls flat.

Patrick Painter Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Dec. 4. www .patrickpainter.com