Getting a sense of urgency

The painting format employed by Adam Ross has remained consistent for much of the last decade. Canvases often 4 feet tall and 6 feet wide are painted with oil and alkyd (a synthetic resin) to create an ambiguous, atmospheric sense of space. An acrid, caustic quality is carried by the choice of metallic and sulfurous colors. Webs of precise drawing recall fragments of architectural drafting, while shapes are mostly rectilinear and crystalline. The space seems to extend into infinity, and the suggestion of a science-fiction cityscape is strong without ever being realistic.

In his confident new paintings at Angles Gallery, Ross retains many of those same elements while adding a potent new twist. With titles like “Life at Rainbow’s End” and “Complete Control,” we are still confronted with a fantasy landscape where trouble lurks. Size and materials are familiar, and so is the sense of a queasy glimpse into an imaginative, Utopian world that is inevitably fractured and gloomy. There are no horizon lines in Ross’ work, so it always feels as if we’re floating untethered through otherworldly vistas.

What is different here is the quality of space. Urgency now fills the atmosphere produced in Ross’ limbo. The new sense of drama is disturbing and apt.

Ross has made the change in a simple way. The architectonic shapes and linear structures remain and are painted with a brush, but the backgrounds are not. There, paint has been poured, stained, left in puddles and sometimes run over with a squeegee. Light seeps, shadows turn crusty. This repertoire of painterly gestures is reminiscent of 1970s Color Field painting and, more recently, Gerhard Richter’s celebrated work; but given Ross’ compositional context, the effect is entirely different.

Tumult, flux and turbulence have replaced distance and infinite expanse. Paints and colors seem to be having chemical reactions with each other, resulting in polluted skies that are thunderous and apocalyptic. Immediacy is heightened.

In a gallery handout, Ross describes the space in his prior work as evoking “the psychological middle ground of Rene Magritte” -- a place of waking dreams, in other words, where objects and places are recognizable yet estranged. The space in his new paintings remains Surrealist, but no longer does it refer to tangible worlds somewhere between daily life and the imaginative surface of the canvas. Now it is wholly abstract, its forerunner located in Miro rather than Magritte.

Ross’ new paintings seem less cautionary, more freewheeling than before. Dystopia and collapse are still out there, but the sense of danger has become acute.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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A harsh yet enchanting world

In a nearly three-minute video loop titled “Soldiers of Light” by Amsterdam-based artist Jen Liu, two rows of earnest young men and women jump or jog in place before a big picture of a spiral galaxy. Bobbing up and down in the lower third of the picture, they are dressed in purest white, shown from the waist up and dwarfed by the looming heavens.

The stamping of their unseen feet creates an almost militaristic rhythm, like a forced march through the galaxy. Meanwhile a repetitive funeral dirge humming on the soundtrack offers a gentle crack of doom. In Liu’s bleak yet oddly refreshing take on a cosmic journey, mortality seems just an inevitable part of life’s eternal cycles.

At Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Liu’s video is housed in a small side room. The main exhibition is dominated by watercolors on paper -- three of them 8 feet tall, like Postmodern Chinese scroll paintings. The most powerful is “Light as Air, Light as Love: Volcano Fire Make Ash Flowers”; the intrepid image of life among apocalyptic ruin is disconcertingly lovely.

As often happens with Chinese scroll paintings, your eye goes on a journey through the landscape -- although here natural catastrophe and colossal cultural events interrupt bucolic scenes. You begin at the bottom, meandering up a grassy path into a city of skyscrapers engulfed in flames.

The buildings hold aloft a vast cemetery, filled with tombstones. Behind it the verdant path transforms into an elegant tangle of red and black flowers -- squint and it almost seems to be a dragon -- winding through ominous coal-black spheres. Each sphere is dotted with tiny white figures waving blank signs, as if in unidentifiable protest. The black orbs rise to a field of explosive volcanoes, where people wearing protective, helmeted jumpsuits wander across rivers of magma.

A specific but inexplicable narrative seems embedded in this generally apocalyptic journey. Overall the effect is sort of Stephen King-meets-Tung Ch’i-Ch’ang. Liu shows the world to be a harsh yet enchanted place, where incompatibilities nonetheless coexist.

Perhaps the strangest work in this beguiling show is a watercolor drawing of a pitch-black sky speckled with thousands of tiny white stars. Two blank white signs poke up along the bottom edge, their absence of text advertising nothing (or maybe nothingness). The pairing of blank signs with a galaxy of stars is haunting -- poignant signals of human life struggling to be heard amid nature’s vast and beautiful indifference.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 837-1073, through May 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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After the fun, it’s time to clean up

The party’s over at Acuna-Hansen Gallery, and what is left behind is Terri Phillips’ “The Joyous Lake.” A sea of glassware variously empty, spotted, stained and partly filled with blue liquid laps across the floor, the tatty residue of a celebration that was surely more fun than its cleanup will be.

Phillips’ installation, her second solo show at the gallery, begins with billowing clouds on the ceiling, just inside the front door. The clouds are made from old wedding dresses. Satin, tulle and seed pearls -- all in whites that range from icy blue to parchment yellow -- are bunched as if ready to burst, like some impending matrimonial downpour. The contradictory aura of this celebratory event is encapsulated in the corner of the room: A few feet above the “lake” of party glasses, a pair of golden cockroaches is suspended on a string.

The incongruity persists in the funniest object in the room -- a small brown lump on the floor, which turns out to be a model of a brain. It is surrounded by a little fence of clay, into which spiky black feathers have been stuck. Given the generalized wedding theme you can’t help but imagine the mother of the bride: Why would any thinking person adorn herself with such a hat?

Installation art composed from found objects has a somewhat stale and musty feel these days, but Phillips has turned that unavoidable fact to poetic advantage here. Innocent hopes, dreams and expectations rub up against more stark and mature realities, and it turns out to be oddly touching.

In the back room, 10 seemingly bland photographs in a solo debut by Christopher Russell slowly disclose a subtle sense of utter desolation. A half-naked doll dangles from telephone wires. A sexy underwear ad is caked with mud. A figure dressed in camouflage attire stomps through the woods.

Elsewhere a telephone pole silhouetted against a gray sky turns a mundane rural landscape into Golgotha. A close-up of an inflatable world globe, slightly rumpled, is framed by the California coastline and bisected by the Tropic of Cancer.

The bleakness of the imagery is underscored by the photographs’ matte surfaces, which seem to suck in any available light. Russell, who also publishes a zine called Bedwetter, has a way with nonchalant despair.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through May 14.

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A painter’s risk proves worthwhile

Lesley Vance paints with rich oils mixed with so much thinner that the image seems poised to melt away before your eyes, like a sugar cube in hot tea. In her solo debut at David Kordansky Gallery, she shows six recent paintings with unlikely subjects. In all of them lushness is fused with tender vulnerability.

In a small untitled canvas, a luminous pearl is nestled inside a shell, which merges into a hand that gently cradles the nugget. Step back, and from afar the disconcerting image suggests a human navel.

“Down Through Branches” is a waterfall of white light glimpsed through peach-laden boughs, like a hallucination of a Chinese scroll. “The Greening” displays a moist, dense, verdant wood, where moss seems to be an irradiated life-force.

Most passages are beautifully painted, but sometimes Vance gets into trouble. A partial figure glimpsed in the trees of “The Greening” is flaccid and lifeless, distracting from the otherwise dazzling landscape.

In “The Colors of the Day Wore On” -- at more than 7 by 10 feet, the largest (and the loveliest) work -- trees dissolve into a welter of hatched strokes of flickering color, sheltering the barely perceptible image of a figure draped in fur and being absorbed into the hollow of a tree. The green of the leaves liquefies into glowing atmosphere, which falls like a curtain over a bed of rose-colored flowers on the forest floor.

There are fairies at the bottom of Vance’s garden scenes, and a surprising, neo-Victorian sense of magic as a refuge from modernity. The show is uneven, but the risk involved in walking the line of greeting-card sentimentality makes Vance’s unusual project worth watching.

David Kordansky Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 222-1482, through May 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.