Paintings that want to be good for your soul

“Liberation” isn’t a word you hear very often in art galleries today. The secular nature of most contemporary art, at least in the West, encourages active, rational reactions: comprehension, evaluation, appreciation. The cool atmosphere of most galleries fosters distance, critical judgment and a shopper’s like-it-or-leave-it mentality. In even the most comfortable spaces it’s difficult to spend time, much less contemplate or meditate on a given body of work, making any sort of genuine rapture unlikely.

The limitations of this mode of experiencing art become clear in the presence of Nepalese artist Romio Shrestha’s spectacular commissioned tanka paintings at Don O’Melveny Gallery. The title of the exhibition, “Liberation Through Sight,” is meant to be taken literally. Like all traditional tanka paintings, these are tools for meditation, contemplation and devotion, intended to encourage spiritual health and clear the way toward enlightenment.

“Art is not for superficial entertainment or to make money,” Shrestha is quoted in the press release. “When you are engrossed in the making of icons, you are in a state of meditation. Beautiful things make you feel good, spiritually and physically. In Buddhism there is no division between art, spirituality and health. People go to galleries and museums because seeing beautiful and colorful pictures makes them relax. When your body and mind are relaxed, you have no choice but to become healthy.”

It may not be quite as simple as that. Shrestha’s pronouncements, in interviews and elsewhere, tend toward the feel-good; but if wholesale liberation is too much to expect of harried Angelenos, these works are sure to inspire an enlightening sense of awe. They’re exceptionally beautiful paintings.

There are just more than two dozen in the show; most are large and a few are very large -- up to nearly 13 feet tall. Rendered in natural mineral pigments such as lapis and malachite, they’re richly toned and frosted in places with a luxurious gold, silver or copper sheen. The imagery is traditional, featuring various Buddhist deities -- Green Tara, White Tara, Yamantaka and the Medicine Buddha, in particular -- suspended in complex mandalic configurations.

The actual painting is not done by Shrestha but by the several dozen artists assembled at the school he founded in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, and the workmanship is exquisite: flawless but decidedly unmechanistic, every line filled with the warmth of the human hand.

It would take more of an expert than me to identify the ways in which Shrestha’s designs deviate from historically traditional Tibetan tankas, but the size is one element he has discussed in interviews. “I created big tankas for city spaces where people don’t have time to sit down quietly and study the details,” he has said. “Americans have lost the capacity to be still and focus, they’re always running to the next appointment, so I made them bigger for America.”

Objectionable as this may be to those Americans who value authenticity, there’s certainly truth to it. In any case, it’s difficult to argue with something as dazzling as the 13-foot “Yamantaka: Vanquisher of Death” -- a dizzying whirl of arms, legs, heads, claws and teeth that’s stunning in its monumentality.

Another apparent deviation, somewhat more difficult to swallow, is Shrestha’s own visibility. Tibetan tankas, in keeping with the Buddhist negation of ego, are traditionally anonymous. But Shrestha has fashioned himself into something of a rock star. Indeed, the earthly and the spiritual, East and West, mesh so tightly in his biography that it’s difficult to know where he’s really coming from.

He was informed by Tibetan Buddhist monks at age 5, for instance, that he was the 17th incarnation of a Tibetan lama, but he was educated by Jesuits and spent a portion of his young adult life surfing and studying architecture at UCLA. He was ordained as a Buddhist monk but married an Irish Protestant woman and divides his time between Kathmandu and Ireland. He runs with Deepak Chopra and lists Madonna, Bono, Charlize Theron and a string of other celebrities as collectors.

The question of where he’s coming from may complicate but needn’t overshadow the magnificence of the paintings. Much of the credit for them goes to the dozens of anonymous artists who pored over them with unfathomably tiny brushes, engrossed in meditation. It is the hallowed quality of this meditation that makes the strongest impression.

Don O’Melveny Gallery, 5472 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 932-0076, through Dec. 31. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.omelvenygallery.com

*

The angst of adolescence

In his first solo show at Sandroni Rey, Leipzig-based painter Jorg Lozek explores the chaos of adolescence with an alternately tender and excoriating touch. Each of the show’s four large interiors depicts a young man alone in a bedroom that appears to be disintegrating around him.

As he reads, writes, dozes or daydreams, patterns clash, plaster peels, planes dislodge and appear to float freely. The angles are jarring and violent, the surfaces deceptive and unsteady, and all of the pieces seem to have become unhinged from one another.

They’re extremely uncomfortable paintings, as awkward in their own skin as the boys are in theirs. In some places, Lozek’s technique is loose, blurred and sloppy; in others, it’s sharp, lucid and photographically distinct. In moments the impression is virtuosic, in others maddeningly clumsy.

The four smaller portraits that accompany the interiors are similarly uncomfortable but considerably less sympathetic. There is a touching intimacy to the interiors; the portraits border on creepy.

In the interiors, the subjects appear to have externalized their chaos; here, it’s packed into their faces. The two boys, each posing against a pale background, are pink and lumpy; the girls, posing against black, gaunt and vampiric. As in the interiors, none of their features seem to line up quite right.

As unpleasant as they are to look at, they’re difficult to look away from. That suggests that Lozek is hitting just the right note, discordant though it may be.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 280-0111, through Jan. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sandronirey.com

*

Enlivened by all of the disorder

The four large, lively landscapes in young Viennese painter Iris Nemecek’s promising L.A. solo debut at Black Dragon Society feel like paint-by-numbers plagued by a succession of happy accidents or an inspired degree of incompetence. They’re idyllic, vaguely tropical locales suggestive of a Rudyard Kipling story, with waterfalls, flowering trees and tranquil turquoise pools.

Something is off: The scattered slivers of color don’t quite line up, the perspective is skewed, depth is confused. But the disarray seems only to enliven the space and sweeten the works’ children’s book palette.

The most impressive is “Pi,” a 6 1/2 -by-10-foot seascape depicting a scene, presumably from the 2003 novel “Life of Pi,” in which a small boat containing the story’s protagonist and his tiger-companion rocks precariously against a towering wave. The only one of the four works to contain either figures or action, its presence in the small gallery is thunderous and exhilarating. The wave is a gorgeous mass of blue and white that sweeps up the gaze of the viewer as briskly as it does the little boat and looms dauntingly overhead, poised to crash down any second.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 620-0030, through Jan. 7. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.black-dragon-society.com

*

Getting to the root of sports

Between the crowds, the advertisements, the news cameras, the sideline activity and the scores, stats and icons that fill television screens, sporting events are visually cacophonous affairs.

In an absorbing series of paintings at Mary Goldman Gallery, Minneapolis-based painter David Rathman pares all this clutter away to get to the essential drama it tends to obscure.

Two men circle each other in a boxing ring. Bodies pile onto a hockey puck. A rodeo clown taunts a fuming bull. A race car tumbles end to end across a track. Each image floats freely in the otherwise blank space of a midsized canvas, like a detail cut out of a larger newspaper photo.

Rendered in watercolor and ink -- black on white in most cases, white on black in a group devoted to professional wrestling -- they’re spare, smudgy little drawings, composed in many cases by a mere handful of wonderfully expressive strokes. Evocative captions and titles underscore the human dimension of these media spectacles.

The triptych depicting the tumbling race car, for instance, Rathman titles “Into Your Arms.” The boxing and wrestling images he tags with such phrases as “And I wonder,” “Ask Me Why,” “Say you believe in me” and “Everyone has a song in their hearts.”

In clearing these scenes of visual clutter and eliminating all evidence of the zillion-dollar industry that typically encapsulates them, Rathman cuts to the root of the events: the charged interaction between human bodies.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 617-8217, through Jan. 21. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.marygoldman.com