Capturing the meaningful from the everyday rush

Frank Paulin made at least several compelling photographs in Los Angeles while visiting from New York in 1956. Those pictures never made it back out here, but several dozen others, taken about the same time in New York and Chicago, comprise Paulin’s first L.A. show, a thoroughly gratifying presentation at Duncan Miller.

Roughly 40 images, some from France and Spain, can be flipped through on racks in the gallery. A tightly edited selection of Paulin’s best hangs on the walls. Each is a terrific distillation of a moment in time, impeccably composed by life itself and adeptly seized by Paulin’s lens. He credits Henri Cartier-Bresson (and the notion of the “decisive moment”) as his greatest influence, but he was also schooled at the legendary Institute of Design in Chicago after the war, where he studied under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Harry Callahan. Paulin (born in 1926) assimilated their teachings well, developing a style both graphically crisp and tenderly humanistic.

“Wild and Wicked” is typically entrancing, a Times Square scene of two carousing young men and a woman, amusingly captioned by the marquee overhead. Like Walker Evans, Paulin incorporated signage frequently in his work, to identify, reiterate or play off whatever else occupies the frame. A 1952 photograph made in Chicago affords a view into a coffee shop. A lone customer sits to one side, and a waitress attends to her work near the center. The trusty props of the diner are spread out behind and around them. Paulin frames the scene through the angular, cutout shape of a window, as if setting this precious gem of ordinariness within a sturdy clasp. The word “lunch” hovers overhead in slim neon letters, declaring the term that the image defines, according to its common usage in that place and time.

Paulin was drawn to the vernacular, the texture of a place, the feeling of a moment. In another photograph made at Times Square, he shows a Cadillac stretched out at the curb. Across the street, a bank of businesses beckons with such signs as “Playland” and “Paradise Bootery,” extending the car’s promise of the good life.

Tensions deriving from class and race are alluded to throughout Paulin’s work, but his agenda, if he had one, never dominated. The life of the street captivated him, especially the telling juxtapositions that occurred as everyday life orchestrated itself. In one picture, a girl roller-skates joyfully across a street near a doll that has been abandoned on the pavement like roadkill, one of its eyes fixed on ours in what feels like an indicting stare. Many of Paulin’s photographs revel in the simple manifestations of a common humanity, but others, like “Doll on Street,” murmur a warning about disconnection and its costs.

Alienation figures into images of two men on a New York street, one inside the shelter of a subway entrance, one passing just outside it, but in poignantly disparate worlds. Another picture places a lone older man in the nexus of the crisscrossing streets of Times Square. Rain puddles in the foreground reiterate the clutter of signage, and steam from the subway grates behind him floats a granular white mist into the dank air. The loneliness and anonymity of the city are palpable.

Paulin’s empathetic eye may have developed out of his first photographic assignment, recording displaced people at Nuremberg at the end of World War II. He continued to photograph, and had a show in 1957 at the Limelight Gallery in New York, but not much of a solo exhibition record over the years. He made his living as a fashion illustrator, drawing ads for department stores. This show, then, serves as a late introduction to a fine talent. As the genre of street photography was hitting its stride in the U.S. in the ‘50s and ‘60s, so was Paulin, crafting significant photographs out of the rush of the ordinary.

Duncan Miller Gallery, 10959 Venice Blvd., (310) 838-2440, through Jan. 25. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.duncanmillergallery.com

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Messages in need of deciphering

Monique Prieto’s new paintings are a bit tricky to decipher at first, and decoding is what they demand and nearly all they have to offer. There’s little to savor or delight in, as with her work of the last decade, which restaged Morris Louis’ color field painting as a vaudeville act, all kindhearted lumps, bullying bulges and ne’er-do-well scraps. The physical humor has faded. In its place, Prieto attempts a more serious form of address, but it’s more passing curious than deeply engaging.

On each of the six canvases at ACME (the smallest a modest 24 by 18 inches, the largest 132 by 72), Prieto has painted a phrase plucked from the 17th century diaries of Samuel Pepys. In a coy reversal, the letters have heft, and the colors (mint, tangerine, rose, aqua, grape, slate) painted around them in flat patches and stripes, do not. The letters are blocky, made to look as if built using crude post-and-lintel construction. Their faces are raw canvas that reads as white, outlined and shadowed in black. The letters stutter across the surface, shifting scale midword, shouts tumbled together with whispers.

Pepys’ writings interweave personal and collective chronicles of life in 1660s London, and a whiff of their flavor comes through in snippets such as “Guided by Nothing but the Barking of a Dog” and “The Wind Furious High and We With Our Sail Up.” The phrases all refer to a kind of disorientation, akin to that enacted by Prieto in paintings that must be navigated verbally and visually at once. Ed Ruscha has worked this territory already, and to more potent effect. There is something endearing about the intentional clumsiness of Prieto’s style, but the charm wears off quickly.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Dec. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com

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Passage and transformation

“Crossing,” an absorbing new video installation by Natasa Prosenc, has a beginning and, about five minutes later, an end. Once the instinct to discern some narrative order in the sequence of images is loosely satisfied, that expectation can be dispatched, leaving the piece to work its real power on its own more visceral, metaphoric terms.

In the main space of Overtones, two different but closely related projections appear on opposite walls. A third component is projected at the end of a corridor off the main space. It’s possible to view all three elements from one place, but most of the work’s effect derives from the two facing projections.

Prosenc studied art in her native Slovenia before coming to the U.S. and earning a master’s of fine arts in film and video from CalArts. She divides her time between her native and adopted countries, and “Crossing” can be read, on one level, as a meditation on passage from one land to another. Images of faces overlaid with rippling, bubbling water follow a brief sequence of bare feet running with thumping urgency. Flight and exile come to mind, but Prosenc’s focus on individual faces (a woman’s in one projection, a man’s in the other) and single, watchful eyes invite a more personal interpretation, having to do with change within the self.

Transformation, even transmutation, is suggested through images of flames licking a hanging body (in the separate, third projection) and squirming patterns in the water that imply corrosion and dissolution of the flesh beneath. Prosenc, who recently completed her first feature film, has created a compelling and concentrated experience in “Crossing” through layering beauty and decay, placidity and unease, alertness and an unanchored dream state, endurance and acceptance, flight and rest, tension and harmony.

Overtones, 11306 Venice Blvd., (310) 915-0346, through Dec. 18. Closed Mondays through Thursdays. www.overtones.org

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Renaissance man looks to the past

Over the last decade, Enrique Martinez Celaya has massaged raw matter from the deepest recesses of the mind and heart into stunning visual form. He has an uncommon wealth of tools at his disposal -- versatility in painting, sculpture, photography, installation and the written word, as well as studies in physics, philosophy and poetry. As viscerally powerful as his work can be, no Celaya show ever feels complete in itself. Each batch of work integrates with what came before the way a fresh journal entry expands upon earlier reflections, or a new melody line weaves its way into a fugue. Images recur; familiar rhythms and moods resurface.

In new painting, photographs and sculpture at Griffin, Celaya continues his meditations on loss, refuge, innocence, melancholy and hope. The show has weaknesses (particularly the group of photographs printed on canvas, which feel conceptually slight and lack the artist’s exquisite sense of touch), but the emotional throughline that unifies his work maintains as strongly as ever.

The intense interiority of the work is independent of scale. A small painting of an iceberg in oil and tar has a stark, brooding presence.

Equally powerful though lighter in spirit is “Refuge,” a huge multi-panel painting on paper of a boy standing on an expanse of green beneath the protective canopy of a rainbow. This radiant figure -- pure, complete, innocent -- complements a slightly larger than life bronze figure, titled “Immigrant,” which is missing one hand and both feet.

The dark, rigid form is propped up on its side on the floor like a piece of driftwood, compromised and vulnerable.

Works in the show bring to mind painters Albert Pinkham Ryder and Caspar David Friedrich, sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz and poet Paul Celan, but the wistful, painfully beautiful atmosphere throughout is pure Celaya.

Griffin, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6886, through Jan. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.griffincontemporary.com