An artist’s relationship to the creative process

“Criticism will have no effect.”

Emblazoned across one of the largest of 11 paintings by Manuel Ocampo at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, the words, in an oozing script reminiscent of a 1950s horror film trailer, set a defiant tone for the rough, messy and often frustrating but rewardingly complex exhibition.

The accompanying artist’s statement reiterates the sentiment with an implicit warning to those who may come to the show with particular expectations, looking, say, for the sort of in-your-face political language that characterized Ocampo’s work through the 1990s.

“I see my current work as having no explanation (or one hasn’t emerged yet),” the statement begins. “I say that more than lacking an explanation, I mainly see it as not needing one. The work exists without one.”

Having said that, he goes on for two dense, single-spaced pages, not so much explaining the work as pouring explanations over it in a convoluted treatise on the relationship between painting and defecation. Alternately lucid and ridiculous, philosophical and crude, the document doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s clearly part of the point. In parodying the excesses of art-world jargon, he’s pointing to the futility of applying words to paintings.

The sheer quantity of language, in the show’s statement, the title (“The Holocaustic Spackle in the Murals of the Quixotic Inseminaters”) and throughout the works, is largely ironic; the real subject of the show is paint itself.

Ocampo’s last solo show in Los Angeles, at Track 16 in 1997, was laced with allusions to the Spanish colonial painting he was exposed to and employed by the church to reproduce as a youth in his native Philippines. The show’s imagery was invariably iconoclastic, but the style was often smooth and lush, with a precision that bordered on virtuosic. Much of the power came from the tension between these moments of sharp, imitation traditionalism and the raw, postmodern expressionism in which they tended to be couched.

This new work is also basically figurative, but the imagery is loose and cartoonish, and any vestige of virtuosity appears to have been forcibly eradicated. The principal characters -- a cross-carrying snowman, a little fellow toting a machine gun, a pink dragon, a thin, disembodied leg -- are a comical but vaguely degenerate lot. The compositions are crowded and self-consciously messy, each constructed around the same stage-like structure, with all the action on the same plane. The palette alternates between garish and dingy.

It is as if Ocampo were trying to make the works as ugly as possible -- to minimize any potential for visual comfort -- as a way of highlighting, even challenging, the substance of the paint. The manner in which he wrestles with it becomes the central narrative of the work.

It drips, droops, clumps, smears; it’s thick here, dry there, watery somewhere else. It drags on the springy quality of the cartoonish imagery, establishing a tension comparable to that which animated the earlier work. One painting devolves all the way into abstraction; the rest flirt with it.

In the end, the paint wins out, its luscious tactility trumping every effort to make it ugly, bland or banal. Nowhere is this more true than in the small gallery adjacent to the paintings, where the artist has installed half a dozen of his pigment-smeared palettes as works in themselves. It is a sweeping gesture, sincere and ironic, audacious and simplistic, encapsulating a range of art historical allusions and bringing the show neatly round to the subject of the statement and Ocampo’s abiding preoccupation: the relationship between creation and elimination, art and refuse, beauty and ugliness.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 837- 1073 www.lizabetholiveria.com, through July 2. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Mesmerized by two strangers

As human dramas go, Kelly Nipper’s video installation “An Arrangement for the Architect and a Darkroom Timer” at MC (a new incarnation of the Project) could hardly be simpler: two young actors, a man and a woman, stand face to face against a solid orange backdrop, just about kissing distance, for an hour. The camera observes them in a single unmoving shot from a fixed position a few feet away. The resulting footage is projected life size and in duplicate, side by side though out of sync, allowing viewers to follow the action at two points simultaneously.

Drama it is, however -- and thoroughly mesmerizing. The actors were apparently strangers before their appearance, and their subtle interaction over the course of this extremely uncomfortable hour reads like a love story reduced to its essence.

They’re an unlikely couple, and the dynamic between them is remarkably mercurial, shifting from moment to moment between flirtation, boredom, intimidation, sarcasm, irritation, affection and fatigue.

In the absence of any real action, the smallest movements assume an almost operatic significance. The flicker of a smile on her lips lights up the screen; the crossing of his arms initiates a bullying power play. Because they never actually touch, the narrow space between them remains thrillingly charged throughout.

A third projection, on a nearby wall, portrays a red apple against a pink backdrop. Over the course of a nine-minute loop, the apple splits neatly into two, each half rolling cleanly away from the other, then magically rejoins. It is a clever companion image, abstracting the already minimalist scenario one step further.

It takes a particular combination of grace and audacity to rest such a large work on such slender conceptual legs, but Nipper gets the balance just right, revealing, in this basic interaction, a psychological equivalent of Blake’s “world in a blade of grass.”

MC, 6086 Comey Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 939-3777, through June 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A rose is not a rose

The four graphite studies in David Smith-Harrison’s exhibition at Couturier Gallery -- each portraying a single rose blossom against a cream- or ochre-colored ground -- are examples of how a truly fine rendering can invigorate even the most cliched of motifs, sweeping away kitschy associations and renewing a sense of admiration and wonder.

The drawings are spare, elegant and, like most of the works in this handsome exhibition, exquisitely executed. Smith-Harrison’s technique is clean and precise, characterized by a confident manipulation of hair-thin lines. Though grounded in the pleasures of drawing, it’s been honed in the considerably less forgiving realm of intaglio etching, where the lines are carved directly into the surface of a metal plate.

The show includes one such plate, which is framed and presented as a work in its own right. Most of the rest of the pieces are prints, and most involve a tree or group of trees and fragments of various styles of architecture.

There is a prettiness to the work that borders on quaint, and one can easily imagine it co-opted for decorative purposes, say in the lobby of a well-appointed law firm. What sets it apart from the more banal fare that might also fall into this category is Smith-Harrison’s inspired craftsmanship, which will never go entirely out of style.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 933-5557, www.couturiergallery.com, through July 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A celestial mystery of white

It’s difficult to know from looking exactly what’s going on in the graceful white-on-white works of German artist Udo Noger. The 12 wall-mounted, mixed media pieces in his exhibition at Ruth Bachofner Gallery have the size, shape and presence of oil paintings, but the glossy feel of prints and the luminosity of light boxes. Organic forms float in and out of the whiteness, and there are ripples of texture, yet the surface of the canvas is smooth and devoid of visible brushstrokes. One senses depth, but as if through a dense fog: the precise quantity or shape of the space each work contains is impossible to discern.

The technical explanation is that each piece contains several successive layers of canvas, the first of which is treated with mineral oil and remains smooth and translucent. The texture derives from Noger’s manipulation of the successive layers. Some areas he builds up with paint; others he shapes with armatures or cuts away. The luminosity is the result of light filtering through these layers and being essentially trapped within the various forms.

The beauty of the work transcends the details of its fabrication. The effect is quiet and peaceful. Moving through the gallery, one feels suspended between sea and clouds, wrapped in a celestial sort of mystery.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. G2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, www.bachofner.com/gallery, through July 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.