Dramatic in any language

Long before the Euro, there was Esperanto, a logical language created by Russian physician L.L. Zamenhof in the 1880s. Built from word bases common to the main European languages, it used simple principles consistently. The goal was mistake-free international communication and, ultimately, greater understanding among all humanity.

Like most types of 19th century idealism, Esperanto died on the vine. Its legacy, however, lives on mostly in the minds of sci-fi fantasizers, but also in ordinary social observers interested in the growing reach of globalism.

Chicago-based painter Scott Anderson belongs to this group. At Mark Moore Gallery, his L.A. solo debut consists of five mesmerizing oils on canvas, each titled in Esperanto. “Interno Stadiano” (Interior Stadium) and “Artisto Monumento” (Artist Monument) depict a sports field and an outdoor stadium, along with such other easy-to-read objects as a Burmese mountain condo, a Space Age monorail and a cement-banked river.

Many other objects appear in Anderson’s representational paintings, but it’s difficult to say what they are. Despite an abundance of realistic detail, glowing orbs could be Modernist lamps or miniature biospheres. Radiant screens resemble computer monitors unavailable on Earth. And flexible conduits might be electrical cords, designer plumbing or life-support systems.

Words -- in any language -- fail to describe the stuff in Anderson’s pictures, which appear to be both landscapes and still lifes. Miscommunication thrives.

“Katedro,” “Naiva” and “Defluiga Tubo” (respectively, “Pulpit,” “Naive” and “Waste Pipe”) are even more complicated. Each depicts a mysterious interior that looks as if it were designed for folks who take multi-tasking far more seriously than we do. Painted in a Mannerist palette of high-keyed purples, midnight blues, vibrant oranges and sizzling reds, these strangely inside-out spaces are the mutant offspring of science labs, late-night lounges, intergalactic command centers and high-tech sewer systems.

The readily identifiable things in each -- sofas, sushi and sound systems -- are surrounded by nooks and crannies that open onto galaxies of confusion. Some are jampacked with juicy brushstrokes. Others open onto the void, its inconceivable emptiness mitigated by the skylines of lunar cities and dazzling stars.

Immediate understanding and universal accessibility are the last things Anderson wants from art. Instead, he cultivates illegibility and incomprehension, which stimulate the imagination. Idiosyncrasy and illogic enter the picture, giving an unborn language an afterlife that is peculiarly suited to the present.

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Depicting the delights of spring

In a new series of paintings, Amy Sillman takes all the good things she had going in earlier works -- luscious brushwork, unpretentious accessibility, trauma-tested optimism -- and kicks them into high gear. Nine oils on canvas (and two on paper) at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects bubble over with so much joyousness that they seem to be about springtime and the exuberance that fills the air after dreary winters.

It’s cliche to say that abstract paintings are about the feelings they convey, but that doesn’t stop Sillman from delivering pleasures common to the season. Surprise and delight take shape in wonderfully light-handed works, which transform the patchwork quality of collages into formally taut yet easygoing compositions. Each looks fresh each time you see it.

In most, Sillman juxtaposes five or six sections whose palettes, patterns and paint-handling do not seem to belong together. Somehow, she makes her rogue constellations of color, texture and shape sing.

The bright orange polygon in the middle of “Cliff 2” rhymes beautifully with an angled slab of black, some blue cartoon clouds, a messy expanse of loosely painted flowers and a swatch of flowery fabric. Two pairs of long legs, which belong in a kid’s stick-figure drawing of a couple of ducks, descend from the picture’s top edge, suggesting even goofier goings-on beyond its border.

In “Cliff 1,” a family of mallards is camouflaged between a field of daisies and a bright orange shape that is beginning to dissolve, like a jet’s vapor trail. Striped drapery and a painterly tangle of pastel pinks and baby blues add to the atmosphere of cheery beginnings.

Sillman’s menagerie includes a dog, a pony, two elephants, a pair of rose-tinted pigeons, a brood of newly hatched chicks and a flock of baby pterodactyls, hanging upside-down like sleeping bats. All fit seamlessly into her savvy paintings, which draw even more powerfully on an even odder melange of artists: Henri Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Georg Baselitz, George Condo and Charlene von Heyl. Mixing abstraction and representation with silliness and seriousness, Sillman makes art and nature play to each other’s strengths.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through May 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com.

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Crafting scraps

of wood into trees

Jared Pankin transforms scraps of wood into landscape sculptures that rise from the floor, sprawl across the wall and reach out into the room -- like the limbs of recycled cyborgs. At Carl Berg Gallery, each of these six abstract forms functions as a gigantic pedestal for at least one realistic tree: a palm, redwood or row of elms.

Although Pankin’s handcrafted trees have their roots in dioramas found in natural history museums or the basements of model train enthusiasts, they do not belong to worlds in which everything is the same scale, the illusionism is seamless and Realism rules. Instead, his trees inhabit worlds riddled with the same contradictions that make modern life so maddening and fascinating.

No single set of rules governs any work’s appearance. The most dramatic contrast takes place between the hundreds of pieces of scrap lumber (which have been nailed and screwed together with haphazard abandon) and the trees (which have been carefully molded, glued and weathered with great fidelity to detail).

Some trees stretch the imagination. The pencil-thin trunk of the super-realistic date palm in “Natural, Natural History (Lucifer’s Left Nut)” rises to impossible heights, towering 5 feet above a gravity-defying peninsula of wood that resembles a rocky outcropping. The two sequoias in “Natural, Natural History (Devil’s Grotto)” and “Natural, Natural History (Beelzebub’s Boney Boney Backbone)” flaunt the laws of nature to follow those of one-point perspective, receding into the distance too fast for the eye to follow without dizziness.

In all, the abundance of scrap wood dwarfs the masterfully fabricated trees, whose tenuous positions are made more precarious by the overlapping slabs of splintered wood that form visual logjams. The leftover lumber suggests a denatured wasteland.

Pankin’s landscapes filter the art of assemblage through the virtual world of digital technology, where pixels, bytes and windows allow myriad perspectives to be grafted together until it’s impossible to distinguish parts from wholes, fact from fiction.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-6060, through April 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.carlberg gallery.com

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Dense, fiery and downright strange

The five big paintings that make up Oliver Arms’ L.A. solo debut are so steeped in history that it’s difficult, when looking at them, not to envision works by other painters, including William Baziotes, Andre Bresson, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Roberto Matta, Robert Motherwell and Clyfford Still. Usually, nodding so obviously to past masterpieces is a recipe for disaster. It almost always ensures that the new works are forgettable footnotes to famous paintings reproduced in nearly every textbook about 20th century abstraction.

But there’s more to Arms’ dense, fiery paintings at Western Project than these standard points of reference suggest. The longer you look, the stranger they seem.

Each consists of molten blobs of color hurtling through a cosmos congested with the residue of furious collisions between asteroids, meteors and unidentifiable intergalactic detritus. Some blobs seem to cavort, like silhouetted cartoon characters, across 6-by-12-foot picture planes. Others resemble humongous insects splattered across a spaceship’s windshield. Still others look like gaseous masses exploding ferociously.

From close up, the surfaces of the blobs are as complex and delicate as Impressionist paintings.

They consist of wispy swirls of red, blue and yellow, intermingled with green, orange and purple. To get the atmospheric effect, Arms uses a belt sander, literally obliterating layers of encrusted oil paint.

The sanded sections look dry. This contrasts dramatically with the thickly brushed grounds, which look wet and far more expressive or gestural.

An odd, Rip Van Winkle quality animates Arms’ art. Out of step with current fashions, his naked paintings travel to the past in ways that may be ahead of their time.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through April 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .western-project.com.