Painting against an established grain

When a young artist hits his stride, it’s always bracing to watch as he pushes against the boundaries established in his earlier work. That’s what Robert Olsen seems to be doing in his latest exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Twelve new paintings make up a marvelous show.

The most remarkable incorporate a slight shift in subject matter. Olsen has painted gas pumps, back alley Dumpsters, broken curbs, bus shelters, ATMs -- the omnipresent objects in the urban landscape of an automobile-dependent society. But often he makes them singular by painting them at night.

Shrouded in darkness and selectively illuminated by electric lamplight, they become the focus of odd perceptual scrutiny. In a 2002 interview with The Times, Olsen mentioned a developing interest in store-window mannequins as subjects, and five examples are in this show. The best are riveting.

All of the mannequins are headless. The vantage is up close, as if you’re standing with your nose at the window glass, and the figures are cropped at the bust or just below the waist. Female, they are dressed in inky black formal attire. The darkness of night seems closely wrapped around their bodies.

One torso wears a fitted jacket with a plunging neckline trimmed with fur, its ostensible softness merging with prickly suggestions of tiny teeth. The artificial illumination casts the severed neck and bodice in a deathly pallor, worthy of the morgue. Two versions of this painting, one horizontal and the other vertical, feel entirely different: The figure in the horizontal composition seems remote and alien, while cropping in the otherwise identical one makes it seem aggressive.

Olsen has painted the side edges of the first panel black, those of the second white. Hanging on a white wall, the first feels dense, dark and weighty, but the second quietly floats the painting’s surface out from the wall. Recognizing the materiality of paintings as objects, Olsen uses such devices to subtly reinforce pictorial illusions.

Details matter. In each of these two paintings, where blacks and whites predominate, it takes a few moments to notice a thin line of red paint drawn along the edge of the jacket cuff, near the panel’s bottom edge. It’s as if the blood has drained from the mannequin -- or perhaps from the picture. The mannequin paintings radiate quiet but inescapable sophistication while exuding a baleful sense of deathly extravagance. They seem just right as social indicators of American life today.

The remaining works are more familiar in Olsen’s lexicon. One, perhaps the most conventionally beautiful, shows a busted-up concrete traffic island, with the reflector-paint on a pair of toppled-over sawhorses glowing in the night. Collapse is always melancholic, but rarely does it look so lovely.

The others show glass-and-steel bus shelters, most with empty advertising panels. Floating rectilinear planes of white hover above amorphous reflections on the ground. Each is an inventory of light: clarity, transparency, translucence and opacity. These shelters form a refuge from the darkness, which mostly serves to make their glowing puddles of illumination exquisitely spooky.

Most of the bus shelter paintings, like all of the mannequin images, are very small (less than a foot on a side). Two, however, are the largest works by Olsen that I’ve seen, approaching 3 and 4 feet in dimensions. Their subjects become downright monumental. He pulls it off in a subtly adventurous show.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, www.vielmetter.com, through July 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Art that sees beyond the eye

When Stephen J. Kaltenbach was a graduate student at UC Davis 40 years ago, art was being rigorously -- and narrowly -- defined as something that happened in the eye. Truly great art was, in the parlance of the day, retinal.

Kaltenbach was among a host of young artists who demurred -- with a metaphoric stick in the eye. Nearly two dozen of his Conceptual works range across the last four decades in a show at Another Year in L.A. (surprisingly, only the second time he’s shown at a gallery here), and they include several that are sly and provocative.

The most famous is “Slant Step 2.” The original slant step, a now-legendary object found in 1965 by Bruce Nauman and William T. Wiley, was a kind of step-stool whose tread was set at an angle -- not level -- which meant that stepping on it would cause you to slip and fall on your face.

Functional yet useless, the strange homemade object passed among several artists in California and New York over the next few years, inspiring a variety of responses to its perception-altering wit. Kaltenbach’s rejoinder was to modernize and multiply: He commissioned an edition of 75 slant steps in bright-yellow molded fiberglass and black rubber.

Mass-producing a unique object deflates the aura of originality, which had grown to mythic proportions with the slant-step legend. It also adds an unexpected layer of distinctive weirdness. Forget sculpture; “Slant Step 2” looks like some cheerful product of the military-industrial complex. No amount of obviously expensive engineering can salvage its attractive inutility. Someone plainly went to great lengths to conceive, design and manufacture this yellow thingamabob. Visually, it’s discordant -- a fact that twists the retinal ideal into knots.

Kaltenbach’s best work plays with art’s visual edge, a notion introduced even before you get inside the gallery. Stenciled on an outside wall are the words “Nothing is revealed.” The idea of stenciling graffiti -- a deeply individual utterance, by definition endowed with autograph personality -- is a wonderful contradiction. And nothingness -- the void -- is something artists have confronted as a defining experience of the modern era. When “nothing is revealed,” some sort of spiritually satisfying artistic plateau has been reached.

Er, hasn’t it? Kaltenbach’s show is characterized by such puzzling, evanescent nuggets.

Another Year in L.A., 2121 San Fernando Road, Suite 13, L.A., (323) 223-4000, www.anotheryearinla.com, through July 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

U.S.-Chinese culture clash

A pair of long fluorescent tubes in the window of Michael Kohn Gallery are wrapped in dark transparency film. Printed on the film, and glowing from the light, are some data.

“If the Chinese use oil at the same rate as Americans now do, by 2031 China would need 99 million barrels of oil a day. The world currently produces 79 million barrels per day and may never produce much more than that.”

Suddenly, everything from the war in Iraq to the possible sale of Unocal washes across your brain. One light bulb sets off another.

French artist Guy Limone has constructed his show around a scholarly research paper that forecasts the shift from the American Century to the Chinese Century (it’s online at www.earth-policy.org). The paper asks: Could the American dream in China become a nightmare for the world?

An overlay of the American economy onto China creates the specter of doom. It also forms the structure of Limone’s art: He likewise layers materials, creating what might be called “sculptural stats.” Social abstractions are given artistic form.

Some are compelling. An inexpensive Chinese export plate, its sumptuous floral pattern covered with plastic animals painted blue, orange and gold to match the pattern and disappear into it, creates disturbing camouflage. Statistics show that should the Chinese super-size their meat intake to American proportions, animals would, in effect, disappear from the planet.

Other works are more confusing and thus defeat Limone’s purpose of translating dull information into enigmatic engines of contemplation. Still, what’s most disarming is the seriocomic tenor of this work: It’s characterized by a quiet yet stimulating sense of apocalyptic play, cheery catastrophe, bright-eyed chaos and colorful devolution -- a graceful string quartet on the Titanic.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, www.kohngallery.com, through Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Two separate but unequal videos

British-born, New York-based artist Oliver Michaels has his solo gallery debut with a pair of videos, and each one turns on a simple conceit: One works, the other doesn’t.

At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “Sync” shows a pair of actors flanking an artificial flower on a table in a room with yellow-striped wallpaper. It might be a funeral home.

The actors talk about death, wait for phone calls and engage in other idle improvisations, all while looking down at what seem to be off-camera notes. It soon becomes clear that the pair were filmed separately (new actors keep popping in and out of the frame), which explains why their communication is out of sync. They talk past each other. Tedious and arty -- “sync” is plainly meant to be a multivalent play on “sink” -- the video goes nowhere.

Neither does “Door,” but here that’s to its benefit. A man dressed in white goes through one door after another, making endless exits and entrances, although the spaces on either side of the door are not contiguous. A kitchen might lead to an attic, a pool hall to a rural porch.

Oddly, the video recalls a Gregor Schneider installation, where rooms lead nowhere and dead ends are the norm. As an existential journey through life, however, the video is filled with an appropriate mix of general tedium and small but delightful surprise. Each unexpected space becomes singular and distinctive, endowed with poignant beauty. “Door” is a kind of “Waiting for Godot,” set in hurried motion.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, www.shoshanawayne.com, through July 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.