Plain Pop packs an emotional punch

Efficiency has always been John Wesley’s strong suit. No extraneous lines or unnecessary colors clutter his crisp Pop pictures of people and beasts.

For more than 40 years, the L.A.-born, New York-based painter has been refining his knack for packing loads of emotional resonance into images as simple and direct -- and sometimes as strange -- as the Sunday comics. At Daniel Weinberg Gallery, five new paintings continue in this vein, adding more tenderness and vulnerability than has ever been seen in Wesley’s work.

Each of his big acrylics on canvas depicts a man and woman in close-up. Only heads and shoulders are visible. The backdrops, which account for small percentages of each painting’s surface, are flat expanses of baby blue, except for one on which Wesley has painted scalloped waves.

The figures occupy the extreme foreground. This allows Wesley to dedicate the largest part of each painting to flesh. He paints faces, necks, shoulders and hands in his trademark palette of delicious pinks. Lips and fingernails provide sexy accents. Sometimes loose locks of hair extend beyond the edges of the carefully cropped images, intensifying their effect.

When Willem De Kooning said that painting was invented to capture the look, feel and presence of human flesh, this isn’t what he meant. For the Abstract Expressionist, flesh and painting were all about animal vitality. For Wesley, painted flesh is a vessel for human consciousness, where memories and daydreams add layers of complexity to the simplest of experiences.

The plain people in Wesley’s pictures either touch each other or are close enough to do so. They all seem to be sharing intimate experiences -- a kiss, a caress, a snuggle or something more.

Discontent also enters the picture. “Slap” depicts the moment after a woman’s palm has made loud contact with a man’s cheek. Taken by surprise, he has not yet had a chance to react. The anger that must have led to the slap can still be seen in the woman’s eyes. But satisfaction is also visible around her mouth as its edges sneak toward a smile, which she may try to hide (or not).

Things happen less swiftly in Wesley’s other paintings, which are all the more potent for their slow-brewed delivery.

Pleasure radiates from the smiling faces of a white-smocked doctor and a bare-shouldered patient in “Herbalist,” suggesting an experience of reciprocal bliss. But a second look reveals that each figure’s mind could be a million miles away, completely occupied by its own fantasies.

The same goes for shared friendship, mutual affection and earnest duty in “Open Boat,” “The Man Who Loves Lipstick” and “Dr. Interrupted.” As a group, Wesley’s works recall the opening of Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” in which the narrator recounts his parents’ inattentiveness to their intimate actions the night he was conceived.

Like Sterne, Wesley is amused, not outraged, by the distractions that keep people from being fully present to one another. His paintings are too wise in the ways of the world to insist that human intimacy and connection must occur simultaneously to be meaningful.

Fifteen small pencil studies from 1962 to 1971 give visitors a thumbnail sketch of his development.

Most are simple line drawings of solitary icons: Napoleon Bonaparte, Calvin Coolidge and Rud- yard Kipling, as well as a bear, a seagull and a dog. Some depict groups of dancing girls or gymnasts. A few feature pairs: wrestlers, suffragettes, a dentist working on a patient. But none has the electricity that runs through Wesley’s new paintings, which rank among the most sophisticated Pop paintings being made today.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through Oct. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Solidarity in rock throwing

In his 10th solo show in Los Angeles since 1992, Sam Durant strips his art down to the basics: anger and desperation spiked with enough intelligence to prevent the volatile mix from exploding into senseless violence or going stale with hopeless despair. At Blum & Poe Gallery, the three-room installation taps into the righteous rage that has always been a part of American political discourse and recently seems to have reached the boiling point.

Being an artist, Durant begins with art history. He chooses his heroes wisely and never rests on precedent. Paying homage to Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Jimmie Durham and Cady Noland, he uses their formal vocabularies to ensnare viewers in situations that are hard to get out of without coming to tough conclusions about art’s place in life and the ways powerlessness poisons both.

The first gallery presents a brief history of rock throwing. On six large mirrors leaning against the walls, Durant has taped six hugely enlarged photographic negatives that depict groups of men hurling stones at various uniformed authorities. From Jackson, Miss., in 1963 to Palestine’s West Bank in 1988, the whirlwind tour of street violence includes stops in Paris (1968), Bogota (1982), Seoul (1987) and Gaza City (1988).

Half of the pictures position viewers behind the anonymous rock throwers. One locates us behind a line of armor-clad riot police. The two most powerful ones put us between the cops and the crowd, caught in the crossfire.

Durant demonstrates that there’s no escape from making a stand. But rather than divide the world into absolute good and evil, as our president often does, Durant argues that at different times and in different places, each of us is on different sides. What goes around comes around; what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Despite the rage theses pictures make palpable, there’s room for poetry. The silhouetted anarchists in the blue-tinted image from Paris have the grace of modern dancers. The athleticism of the black men in Mississippi is classic. And the young boys from the West Bank are gleeful. They smile and laugh as they send a volley of rocks down the road.

There’s nothing funny about violence. But in conveying the boys’ joy, the print makes an important point: Rock throwing is a largely symbolic activity.

That’s not to say that no one gets hurt when such weighty symbols are hurled at cops and soldiers, through windows and storefronts. It’s simply to insist that rock throwing, through the ages, gives stark form to an oppressed group’s discontent, provides cathartic release and galvanizes group solidarity. It has its roots in social injustice, but it’s never meant to be a solution to political conflict or economic inequity.

That’s also true of art.

Art is a symbolic activity that brings some folks together and separates some groups from others. Many activists and aesthetes mistake it for a solution to complex problems better settled by other means.

The two other rooms in which Durant’s works are installed drive this point home. One is a rudimentary house of mirrors arranged around a fiberglass sculpture of a precariously balanced rock. The other features a chain-link cage with an Orwellian sign. In both, viewers play hide-and-seek with themselves. The symbolism of art and the symbolism of activism fitfully spill into each other.

Durant is a Realist who refuses to let his ideals be corroded by narrow-minded viewers -- across the political spectrum -- who mistake symbolism for the real thing.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through Oct. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Seeing the beauty of the present

Two years ago, Nick Lowe’s solo debut featured collages and drawings in which astute formal intelligence kept chaos at bay -- just barely. On the brink of spinning out of control, the young artist’s works on paper riveted a viewer’s eyes to the cut-and-paste action.

In four new paintings at Black Dragon Society, Lowe transfers the best aspects of his works on paper to paint on canvas. The new medium allows for greater nuance and sensuality, not to mention risks like muddiness and pretentiousness. Lowe serves up the former and sidesteps the latter. His big pictures of simple scenes are kaleidoscopic extravaganzas jampacked with juicy passages, happy accidents and a savvy mishmash of clashing references.

“Baghdaddy Kane” exploits the drippy translucence of watercolors and acrylics. Its luminous oranges, yellows and pinks depict a medieval fortress aglow with spiritual radiance in a landscape that includes palm trees, snow banks, icicles and a frozen moat. Imagine a fever dream inspired by “Citizen Kane” and Al Jazeera news stories and you’ll have an idea of the loaded poetry at work in Lowe’s strange paintings.

“Rugmuncher” uses the saturated opacity of oil paint to transform an empty room into a dazzling display of Lowe’s capacity to make simple patterns explode with funky rambunctiousness. Pulsating planes of hot and cold colors propel your eyes around the room’s walls and across its ceiling’s beams. The giant rug on the floor looks like a Picasso painting run through a paper shredder.

In “Midnight Taxi,” Lowe combines acrylics and oils. More important, he brings the microscopic detail and pencil-point precision of his drawings to the midsize painting of a taxi parked behind a tree and under a sky filled with more stars than are visible through the most powerful telescope. It’s the best work in the exhibition. Painstaking without seeming fussed over, it shows Lowe at his most trippy. He practices a type of ham-fisted virtuosity that captures the absurd beauty of the present.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 620-0030, through Oct. 18. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Freedom found in singular focus

Tyler Stallings’ new paintings are too beautifully crafted not to take seriously. But they’re also too coy to sustain lasting romances with viewers who want more than one-glance-stands.

At Newspace Gallery, Stallings’ images fall into four groups: landscapes, portraits, animals and interiors. The landscapes are the most conventional: distant vistas of sensitively rendered trees, valleys and mountaintops, all bathed in seasonal sunlight. These seemingly sincere works suggest that trendiness may hold no allure for the artist, who is also the chief curator of the Laguna Art Museum.

His portraits prove otherwise. Each wears its love of hip attitude on its sleeve. All of the sitters have huge eyes, like Keane kids, which have been unfashionable just long enough to be ripe for recycling. Worse, Stallings’ fish-eyed figures borrow too directly from John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Nancy Burson to get out from under their shadows.

The mildly distorted animal pictures also recall works by other artists, such as Peter Zokosky, John Lofaso, Jo Ann Callis and Todd Hebert. But these artists are not so far out of Stallings’ league that he’d get very far riding their coattails. And his monkey, goat, owl and horse are sufficiently mysterious to make viewers curious about the links between people and beasts.

Stallings’ interiors initially appear to be the least engaging paintings. But they turn out to be the most captivating.

Each depicts a dramatically lighted and radically cropped section of a house under construction. In plywood, lumber and poured concrete, Stallings discovers a world rich in detail and wide in latitude. Sometimes, focusing on a single subject leaves more room for viewers and gives the artist enough room to do his own thing.

Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Oct. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.