Random acts as part of the plan

Think of Diana Cooper’s wall reliefs as a visualization of the way a computer virus might work: Havoc occurs through precise channels of organization, manic energy merges with exacting control and data seem to wobble between ferocious and benign. The structure of her art is a hybrid of machine regularity and human caprice.

In fact, maybe this is also what logic looks like -- carefully composed yet far messier and more random than we assume.

At Carl Berg Gallery, the New York-based artist is having an engaging L.A. solo debut. Cooper composes her reliefs from paper, ink, foam-core, pushpins, acetate, the occasional snapshot, paint (usually red or blue), felt, corrugated cardboard and other such materials. Most of them are related to the stuff used to make diagrams, models, charts and similarly descriptive tools. It’s as if Cooper has something urgent to explain, and her work is bursting to show and tell.

Some works are affixed to canvases, others to the gallery wall.

The largest, titled “Swarm,” proliferates across two adjoining gallery walls and spills out into the room and onto the floor. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of individual elements are included, many of them covered with the kind of repetitive linear patterns found on doodle pads or in an Art Brut drawing by an outsider artist.

Black V-shapes are pinned in clusters. Here they swoop toward the corner of the room, like birds flying in semirandom formation; there they converge in a mass, as pigeons do when feasting on a pile of bread crumbs.

Snippets of photographs show clusters of tiny pompoms suggestive of spores. Linear patterns and packing materials recall circuit boards. Natural systems seem to merge with electronic imagery.

Cooper’s peculiar, labor-intensive work has affinities with that of younger artists such as Nick Lowe and more established ones like Sarah Sze. The work is poised between drawing and sculpture. Drawing is what gives her reliefs their lively and serendipitous sense of unfolding thought. (In the manner of Matisse, she sometimes draws with a pair of scissors.) Sculpture makes it tangible.

Perhaps that’s why “Swarm,” for all its panache, is finally less engaging than “My Eye Travels,” the show’s title work. “My Eye Travels” is large -- nearly 10 feet wide -- and many of its relief elements stand 6 or 7 inches from the wall. It seems to be probing the space of the room -- anxiously checking out the space you also occupy -- which gives the work an edge. “Swarm” seems more user-friendly.

Cooper’s reliefs and installations come with assembly manuals, not unlike the ones that come with your personal computer, VCR or mobile phone. Obsessive and compulsive, “My Eye Travels” exists somewhere between a self-contained drawing and an environmental deluge. The sense of instability is salutary.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Feb. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Adornment is never excessive

In the aesthetic universe inhabited by Carolyn Castano, a monkey carrying a Chinese parasol counts as an everyday genre scene. If ornament is crime, as Adolf Loos averred almost 100 years ago, surely Castano is America’s Most Wanted.

Castano first drew notice two years ago at the UCLA Hammer Museum’s drawing survey, “International Paper,” with big, elaborate collages of preening peacocks. For her ambitious solo debut at Kontainer Gallery she shows nine new works that continue to push the boundaries of her Postmodern Baroque.

Castano begins with fashionable magazine images of feminine consumer excess -- designer gowns, elaborate jewelry, expensive cosmetics, dangerously spike-heeled shoes and the like. A picture of a dress composed from yards of billowy satin is entangled by elaborate watercolor interlaces with luscious lips smeared in ruby lipstick. Then she pours on the glitter.

Bits of ostrich feathers are added. Fake gemstones and false eyelashes are glued on. In one case, what appears to be a Christmas tree ornament dangles from the surface. Enough is never enough.

High-end fashion advertising is pushed to its logical conclusion -- which is to say it explodes into an extravagant orgy of over-designed excess. Castano appears to be searching out an element of social power lurking within ornamental overload. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, she seems to say -- then take them to the edge.

Castano’s new work includes suggestive new imagery. Within the decorative flourishes of “Blood in the Afternoon” is a photograph of a sexily attired bullfighter and a depiction of an ornery, stamping bull. Nothing is more dramatically ornamental than a magnificent “suit of lights.” The ferocious, highly ritualized standoff between them is an apt metaphor of the kind of power play her art means to dissect.

Kontainer Gallery, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-4746, through Feb. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

It’s all in the atmosphere

Luisa Lambri photographs inside classic buildings by Modern and contemporary architects -- Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Renzo Piano, Oscar Niemeyer, Giuseppe Terragni and many more. It is less the bricks and mortar that she means to record, however, than it is spatial transparency and luminosity. Her photographs are atmospheric.

For her second solo show at Marc Foxx Gallery, the Milanese artist is showing 14 images from three bodies of work. The most compelling is a group of seven photographs, made in 2003, that focus on a wall of windows overlooking a leafy landscape.

Lambri places her camera at slight angles to the window wall, forsaking the flat, planar view more typical of both modern architectural photography and large-format digital pictures by such contemporaries as Candida Hofer or Thomas Struth. She gently knocks the grid off-kilter instead.

The louvered windows, framed in white steel, are vertical and opened to varying degrees. The result is to lightly shatter the optical space, almost like a Cubist painting.

Each plane of glass frames a view while also reflecting light or calling attention to its own surface through streaks of dried water. A viewer is always aware of space behind the camera as well as in front of it.

The length of Lambri’s exposure is such that the sky beyond the greenery is flat and white, just like the architectural foreground glimpsed in the edges of the picture and in the window frames. Space is at once shallow and vast, intimate and infinite, with nature sandwiched in between.

Lambri’s savvy pictures, which share a kinship with the more widely known work of Uta Barth, feel intuitive rather than analytical. They use buildings as templates that shape perception, conveying a distinct sense of place that is finally more photographic than architectural.

Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5571, through Feb. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

The ordinary in colorful splendor

Jennifer Guidi is a gifted colorist. In her solo debut at ACME, the young artist shows 11 modestly sized oil paintings on linen that orchestrate color in exquisite ways.

All the paintings are carefully cropped, snapshot-like views in and around domestic landscapes and L.A. apartments. Taking a cue from an artist like Fairfield Porter, Guidi chooses scenes that are casual glances made hundreds of times on an ordinary day -- a euphorbia, a dove, a roof-line framed by palms. Once her eye (and thus your eye) falls on something, she zeroes in for hard look at its chromatic splendor, taking you along for the pleasurable ride.

Violet-gray sky slams up against a gray-green wall. Dappled marks of crimson, gold, purple and sapphire highlight a trim of blindingly white stucco before exploding into the party-colored fireworks of a nearby palm.

In the most beautiful picture, colored strings tied to security bars on a bungalow window create a striped pattern of lines and shadows across a stucco wall. The vertical strings, apparently holding up potted plants suspended out of sight beneath the picture’s bottom edge, establish a perfect foil for horizontal streams of puddled color. This intimate Realist view turns into a dazzling abstraction reminiscent of Sam Francis’ art, which is no mean feat.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through Feb. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.