Wicked humor, genuine anger

Raymond Pettibon’s new works on paper are denser and darker than anything he has made. Wicked humor still rips through his signature blend of incisively captioned images, but in nearly 60 ink and acrylic drawings at Regen Projects the funny business takes a turn toward absurdity and then spirals inward -- to the depths of what would be despair if not for the anger and tenderness Pettibon wrestles from the existential mess his pictures stir up.

Installed salon-style, in six thematic clusters, Pettibon’s comic-book-style drawings resemble pages torn from a frantically compiled diary. They are accompanied by a short animated video in which some come to life as a plain-spoken narrator offers commentary that leaves viewers free to make discoveries that cannot be spoon-fed or served up second-hand.

His trademark line-work, characterized by rapid slashes of black ink, relentless strokes and cut-to-the-heart shorthand, is in ample supply in the drawings. What’s new is the color: supersaturated reds, blues, yellows and greens.

Pettibon often complements these intense passages with lighter, more translucent ones, creating a wide range of hues from one jar of paint. At other times, he piles on brushstrokes, creating rich, densely layered sections of multihued browns, grays and golds. They are just the thing for rendering conflagrations, artillery explosions, tidal waves and the lightswallowing emptiness of the void -- all of which appear repeatedly.

Elements of collage enhance the visual wallop and add to the bittersweet resonance. In some works, Pettibon uses his recently deceased father’s etchings of nude figures, carefully cutting and pasting them into his own doubt-laced stories about self-reliance, rebellion, tough love, failure and perseverance.

As a painter, Pettibon occupies the strange territory between a weekend watercolorist and a preschooler with a new set of tempera paints. The mix of subtlety and crudeness, delicacy and urgency is potent, allowing him to broach loaded subjects with disarming humility.

Individually, Pettibon’s works are about paying attention to current events, with images of Dick Cheney, Abu Ghraib, the American flag and Jesus intermingled with metaphor-loaded stories about ballplayers, astronauts, original sin, love gone bad and art’s place in it all. As a group, however, Pettibon’s pictures tend toward the timeless, addressing such enduring issues as the meaning of life and the point of it all.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through May 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com

Packing a lot into very tight quarters

Barnett Newman’s legendary zip paintings mark moments in time by dividing the past from the future in flashes of spine-tingling brilliance. Richard Allen Morris’ thin vertical paintings do something similar: pack everything into the moment, after which everything is different.

At Mandarin Gallery, six of Morris’ skinny paintings take up less space than a 2-foot-by-2-foot canvas. But there’s so much to see in each 3 1/2 -inch-wide panel that you get lost in the mind-blowing moves he gracefully jams into his compact abstractions. These are some of the biggest paintings around, especially in terms of generosity and satisfaction.

No two are alike. The smallest is not as long as a ruler. “Jazz Nest” is an improvisatory extravaganza that piles thick swipes of rich burgundy and deep forest green atop swift smears of baby blue and snowy white. If a rainbow were a waterfall, this is what it would look like.

“Plastic Campaign” is all choppy frothiness, a slice of a tertiary-tinted sea just after a storm. And “Gargoyle” is a casual masterpiece, its playful combination of paint squeezed straight from the tube and slathered on with a palette knife resembles the aftermath of a food fight between Matisse and Gauguin.

“Order Yours Today,” “Egyptian” and “Body and Soul” are more complex and layered. They are also longer, reaching up to the length of a yardstick. In all three, Morris more vigorously mixes aqua, yellow and burgundy, along with pink, green and white, creating grays that are sumptuous and funky.

Morris’ paintings are little symphonies of serendipity. The beautiful things that happen in every square inch are too loose and free to have been thought out in the head. They come straight from the body -- but only after a lifetime of disciplined looking, years of patient practice and a whole lot of talent.

Mandarin Gallery, 970 N. Broadway, Suite 213, (213) 687-4107, through May 20. Open Wednesdays through Saturdays. www.mandaringallery.com

Voyeurism turned into a virtue

American art has never been comfortable with voyeurism. It’s too passive, detached and fetishistic for our national mythology, which puts a priority on active participation, utilitarianism and pragmatism.

At Western Project, Tanya Batura’s L.A. solo debut turns this ethos upside down and inside out. Her masterfully sculpted and exquisitely painted ceramic figures transform viewers into voyeurs while making a virtue of voyeurism. Both creepy and intimate, her works stir an uneasy stew of emotions that is difficult to dismiss and impossible to resolve.

Batura’s life-size heads rest on plain plywood pedestals or hang flush with the wall, like perverse hunting trophies. Most depict corpulent bald men with their eyes shut, lips parted and tongues extended in ecstasy.

Some look as if they have just tasted a delicacy so delicious it’s transcendent. Others appear to be lost in orgasmic bliss. From other angles or points of view, the same figures appear to be sleeping. Or dead.

All are painted icy white, like the porcelain fixtures in labs and bathrooms. Batura sprays translucent layers of rosy red or cool lavender on their lips and tongues, creating highlights that suggest smeared lipstick or hypothermia. Delicate yellows, browns, purples and greens on the surrounding flesh resemble faded bruises.

Two of Batura’s figures wear dull green bondage hoods. They lack the unsettling power of her six other works because they are missing the expressiveness Batura captures on the exposed faces.

More important, the hooded figures do not convey the intense pleasures so visible on the uncovered faces. That is where her fantasy-fueled Realism is at its best: setting the stage for imaginary dramas in which satisfaction is both out of reach and too close for comfort.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through April 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western-project.com

Fitting divergent parts together

Fragmentation links the works in “This Is Not a Test,” an impressively coherent group exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery. The four-artist show plays abstraction against representation and found objects against fabricated forms to create an environment in which cool toughness and shrill hysteria collide.

John Lyon builds breakdown into his big plaid paintings by spray-painting some sections, brushing on others and pouring puddles of acrylic on still others. If thunderstorms entered computers like viruses, their monitors might resemble these maelstroms of queasy color, fractal geometry and dystopian dread.

David French’s abstract sculptures appear to be emaciated asteroids or the molten guts of burned out supercomputers. Painted with metallic auto enamel, they change colors faster than chameleons on speed and more fabulously than smog-enhanced sunsets.

Stephen Peirce’s photo-realist paintings of small junk sculptures recall sci-fi special effects. They suggest the surgically repaired entrails of cyborgs or clusters of high-tech devices adapted to other purposes.

Martin Durazo uses aluminum struts, nylon straps, metal clamps, electric fans, strobe lights and plastic mirrors to create 3-D pieces that marry the neat geometry of Minimalism to the splintered space of Cubism.

The show’s mix-and-match, anything-goes attitude complements each piece’s gregariousness, making for a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., A-1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.markmooregallery.com