A treatise on time, in stencil

New York artist Lawrence Weiner did not invent Conceptual art, but for nearly four decades he has been among the genre’s most refined, even elegant exponents. An exhibition of new work at Regen Projects, his first solo in L.A. in six years, shows him at top form.

The centerpiece is an environmental installation composed solely from words rendered by a sign painter on the surrounding walls of the large main gallery -- Weiner’s trademark motif. This work is not site-specific, because it could be reconfigured for another room in another building in another place. But insofar as Weiner has carefully composed the arrangement to accommodate the size, scale, layout and dimensions of this particular room, it is site-related. The stark white walls have been approached the way a painter addresses a blank canvas.

As a three-dimensional environment, the piece is also sculptural. It is abstract, because it is composed of words and graphic marks, but it is also representational, given that language is a system that employs conventional signs for communicating ideas. And the anonymity of Weiner’s method, which employs another person to make the physical work, removes it from an isolated precinct of autonomous self-expression represented by autograph marks of a painter’s brush.

The nature of art -- how we conceive of it and what our assumptions about it are -- has been Weiner’s steady subject, and familiar attributes of painting and sculpture, as well as abstraction and representation, are appropriate concerns. So is design. This work is a mural, painted around four walls in the irregularly shaped room -- sort of Baroque Conceptualism. Weiner has chosen a distinctive typeface for the words.

Each letter is broken up in an unusual way. Imagine a horizontal and a vertical space slicing through the center of the letters. In the case of a letter Y or Z or M or any other that includes a 45-degree angle, a space also angled at 45-degrees interrupts the connection between the lines.

This stencil font is called Offline, and it was designed in 1998 by the Dutch graphic artist Roelof Mulder. (Weiner lives part-time in Amsterdam.) The font has the look of the stenciling you might find on an industrial shipping crate, except less gritty, which puts you in mind of the international movement of goods. Its artistic ancestry lies in the work of Jasper Johns. However, this more cultivated and artistic typeface also reveals Weiner’s characteristic wit.

“Offline” is a relatively new word, postindustrial and proliferating in the Digital Age. It is of course information jargon, which means one is not connected to a computer or computer network. To communicate offline is to move from a public bulletin board to a private message. It means “not here and not now” -- which, for Weiner’s mural, creates a subtle but dizzying enigma.

Here’s how: Weiner’s mural text repeats the phrase “just one time,” painted in a silvery gray with black borders, on each of the room’s four walls. Each one is paired with a right-leaning graphic loop, painted in black-bordered hot pink. It’s the first thing you see when you enter, directly opposite the corner doorway, and the rightward tilt pushes your eye clockwise around the room.

The other three walls join “just one time” and the graphic loop with another, different phrase: “through a hole in the wall,” “through the eye of a needle” and “through a crack in the door.” These phrases have multiple associations. Some imply criminality or vice -- spying, say, or eavesdropping -- as well as biblical virtue (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” -- Matt. 19:24). What they share is the repetition of the word “through.” Art provides an opening to move you, and an implied promise that it won’t leave you where you started.

Crucially, however, Weiner’s art disrupts our common conception of time as a linear journey from past through the present to the future. Almost as a ritual incantation the mural repeats, “just one time, just one time, just one time.” Each moment is the only moment. Time is all-at-once.

Art is empirical, this work insists -- and compellingly so. It is verified through observation, not theory. There are no illusions or subjective qualities to it. Art happens here and now.

Printed in offline type -- “not here and not now” -- as befits the intimate experience of art -- the work’s speculative proposition fairly sings. Wiener has also produced a fine artist’s book, a group of related laminated drawings and a smaller stenciled piece in the entry of the show, but the main room is the main event.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Dr., West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, www.regenprojects.com, through June 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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From 1,000 words down to one

Put some words next to a photograph, and the immediate inclination is to read the words as a caption that clarifies the picture. In the 18 new works by John Baldessari at Margo Leavin Gallery, that tendency prevails -- before slowly falling apart. As it does, blind assumptions are giddily upended.

The series is titled “Prima Facie” -- from the Latin for “first face,” meaning at first sight -- and each work pairs a black-and-white photographic head shot on the left with a single word in black type against white on the right. A sleek young woman with her head tilted slightly up and an unreadable expression on her face is paired with the word “cool.” An older man with his eyes averted to the side is paired with “suspicious.” A bubbly blond wearing a feathered hat and a wide grin is paired with “sunshiny,” and so on.

Some works include as many as five pairs of portraits and words. The pairings seem to talk with each other: a “dorky” young guy and an “annoyed” woman (his mom?), or a flurry of elaborately emotional people who are “unctuous,” “ecstatic” and “cynical.”

These found portrait heads are closely cropped. All they wear is their facial expression, while minimal composition and lighting is all that’s left of the original context. Baldessari always works with found photographs, rather than ones he’s shot, which gives each character a sense of being at once an individual and an Everyman. The urge is strong to read “sunshiny” as a description of the quintessential bubbly blond or to assume that “suspicious” is a character trait of any man with averted eyes.

Logically, though, there’s no reason to do so. Baldessari makes the word and picture equivalent in size and placement; they’re on equal footing. Hierarchies collapse. Habit -- or mundane prejudice -- is exposed.

First sight gives way to second and third. All the chosen words are adjectives, and as an adjective the term “prima facie” means “evident without proof or reasoning.” The paired image and word begin to wrestle with each other for influence, but the match is more like the WWE than Olympic wrestling -- an amusing species of theatrical play.

Words, which first seemed to color the black-and-white portraits, are as easily given shape by the highly particularized look on a person’s face. At the same time, the word and the picture might each be autonomous, pulling us in directions we really should resist.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through May 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Paintings that multiply

In his indispensable little 2000 book, “Chromophobia,” the British artist David Batchelor demonstrated the degrees to which the Western imagination since antiquity has displayed a profound fear of color, as an agent of moral contamination or a sensual sign of corruption. By contrast, Carlos Estrada-Vega is an artist who might easily regard the garishly painted statuary of Hellenistic Athens as superior to the supposed “purity” of the museum-bound Elgin marbles.

At d.e.n. contemporary, Estrada-Vega is showing a dozen new paintings in which color comes in luscious, bite-size chunks. Each painting is composed from scores of small, canvas-covered cubes (and a few short dowels), and each cube is slathered with a thick mixture of oil, wax, paste and pure pigment in a single color. The surface fairly bristles with life.

The back of each little cube has a magnet, with which it is adhered to a metal panel. The cubes are of different sizes, so the surface topography is uneven. A brilliant painting such as “Daisy” at first seems to be a bright yellow, but closer inspection reveals a wide array of vivid colors that includes greens, browns, oranges and ochre. Think Van Gogh’s sunflowers, exploded.

Estrada-Vega titled his show “Between 12 and 5,000 Paintings,” and the proliferation of tiny canvases to make a big picture mimics the propagation of art today. In addition to joyous, this is sly and savvy work.

d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, www.dencontemporaryart.com, through April 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Weaving body and mind together

Kristin Leachman has been basing her paintings’ subject matter on domestic activities like weaving, knitting and braiding for about a decade, but it isn’t that conventional, even academic feminist trope that makes them so compelling. Her tangled knots of cascading yarn and braided cloth, painted in rich oil colors on tall birch panels that stand a few inches out from the wall, suggest everything from woodland waterfalls to undersea coral reefs, distant galaxies and animal viscera. Like the universe glimpsed in a grain of sand, her work plays with scale in marvelous ways.

Each of the five paintings at Newspace stands just over 6 feet tall and 1 foot wide. They pull you in close, mirroring your upright body, and the luxurious paint handling emphasizes the panel’s surface skin. The representational imagery keeps collapsing into brushstrokes that are calligraphic in nature, recalling the action of the hand and wrist. Leachman intensifies a sense of intimacy that is at once sensual and contemplative, stitching together the body and the mind in ways our culture usually keeps split. She calls this body of work “House Spirits,” and the title fits.

Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 469-9353, www.newspacela.com, through May 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.