Unfathomable acts evoke a sense of awe

“A truck crashes into the house of the Rivero Delgado family. Mexico City, 8 May 1953.”

“45-year-old dry cleaner Manuel Ramirez Atilano dies whilst trying to connect illegally to the national grid. Mexico City, 9 October 1971.”

“Dressmaker Bertha Ibarra Garcia hangs herself from the tallest tree in Chapultepec Park, unable to bear the fact that her estranged husband has taken their daughter to live with him and his lover. A photograph of her daughter, along with a note saying nobody is to blame for her death, is found in her handbag. Mexico City 1977.”

The captions are frank, often gruesome and heartbreaking. The pictures that accompany them, by Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides, are as harrowing as you might expect -- but also fascinating, touching and startlingly beautiful.

With about three-dozen identically framed 20- by 24-inch prints, mostly black-and-white, in an even line around the perimeter of the exhibition space, this may be the most staid installation Blum & Poe has ever mounted.

The images inside the frames, however, are windows into chaos and catastrophe. In some, the detestation is cataclysmic: airplanes planted head first in the ground; train cars mangled and strewn like toys; automobiles piled on top of one another; entire buildings consumed in black smoke and flames. In others it’s personal, even intimate: a woman in a sundress with her face buried in her arm, sitting on the grass next to the body of her dead boyfriend; a mother, glimpsed from behind, carrying a coffin the size of a small child; letters and other personal effects splattered with the blood of a bride who was jilted at the altar and returned to the church to shoot herself in the head.

The painter Robert Williams once wrote that “something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas,” and no one knows it better than a tabloid photographer, which is what Metinides was from the late 1940s through the early 1990s. He published his first front-page photograph in La Prensa at age 12 and spent the next 50 years trailing police cars and ambulances, often as a volunteer with the Red Cross, and publishing in newspapers and magazines around his hometown of Mexico City. He stopped photographing professionally in 1993. In recent years, however, the work has come to the attention of the art world, with exhibitions in Mexico, Europe and the U.K. This show marks Metinides’ first solo show in the U.S.

It’s easy to see how the work could make this transition. Viewed individually, in the context of a newspaper, the pictures would certainly have served their purpose, communicating the drama of the situations with vivid clarity. Viewed in the aggregate, a deeper register of aesthetic, moral and even philosophical concerns emerges. Like Williams in his way -- or like Weegee, Metinides’ closest American counterpart -- Metinides takes that “something dead in the street” merely as a starting point.

Beyond the masterful craftsmanship and the tender psychological insight (Metinides’ portrayal of relief workers is particularly touching), the most resounding quality to emerge from the work is an almost religious sense of awe. That something as massive as a train car could crumple like cardboard, that a plane could fall from the sky and shatter into a thousand pieces, or perhaps most mysteriously, that the life could slip out of the body of a loved one right before your eyes -- such facts are inescapable but also, on some level, unfathomable. Metinides’ life work is a haunting record of the struggle with this mystery.

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 836-2062, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com

Themes of light and electricity

Intelligently conceived, rigorously refined and elegantly fabricated, Emilie Halpern’s second solo show at Anna Helwing Gallery is a pleasure to encounter. At a time when so many seem to be evoking the banner of Conceptualism simply as a way around having to work very hard, the conscientiousness of Halpern’s approach -- the thoroughness and care with which she treats idea and object -- distinguishes her as one of L.A.’s most promising young artists.

Titled “White Nights,” the show is a bundle of tenderly cultivated conceptual threads all relating in some way to electricity and light.

At the center of the installation are several large, delicate, spidery forms stretching down from the ceiling like frozen bolts of lightning. (They’re made from thermoplastic-coated wire.) Nearby is an audio piece that projects the sound of a human heartbeat gradually accelerated, as if by electricity, to the speed of a hummingbird’s heartbeat; then a Polaroid of a man with a lightning-like pattern drawn across his back, simulating a condition known as “lightning flowers” that develops temporarily on the skin in the immediate aftermath of being struck; then a photograph of a desert flower that blooms only once a year, and only at night, dying with the light of dawn -- or, presumably, with the flash required to take the picture.

Though formally elegant, the work hearkens to memories of elementary school science fairs, to a time of ant farms and baking-soda volcanoes, when science seemed not so far removed from magic. Halpern’s methods are pointedly low tech and she always reveals them, adding notes to the checklist describing her intentions and explaining the relevant scientific information.

From within this collection of natural phenomena, deeper themes begin to emerge, revolving around the interplay of light and darkness, life and death, the body and its absence. The resounding through line is fascination, and Halpern shares her own generously.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 202-2213, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.annahelwinggallery.com

Biting satire is lost in Beverly Hills

Francesco Vezzoli’s “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula,’ ” a 5 1/2 -minute preview for a film that doesn’t actually exist, was a hit at the Whitney Biennial this year. A lavish, lurid and stridently lascivious spoof complete with movie stars (including Helen Mirren, Milla Jovovich and Courtney Love, as well as a cameo by Gore Vidal himself), costumes by Donatella Versace, a faux-Roman villa, lots of graphic sex and a quasi-Hollywood voice-over, the work was praised by many as biting political satire aimed at the decadence of American culture and the judgment of our own reigning emperor.

After seeing the piece in Vezzoli’s solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, I’m not sure I buy it.

This may have something to do with the location. In the rarefied air of a Manhattan museum, I can see how the piece might win people over. It’s just the sort of fantasy that tends to appeal to smart New Yorkers and Europeans: a critique of Hollywood as the heart of all corruption and ridiculousness, one that preserves for these viewers all the pleasure the entertainment industry affords the rest of us (all the skin, for instance, in this work) while allowing them the added satisfaction of their own scorn.

In the moneyed buzz of Beverly Hills, however, with the suits, stars, starlets and street sweepers who drive the industry populating the sidewalks just outside the gallery’s door, the irony is less apparent and the parody seems somehow off. What in New York may feel like mimicry and satire here reeks of pandering.

If there is a critique of celebrity in there somewhere, it’s pretty well buried in imitation and emulation.

The rest of the exhibition involves several works relating rather obscurely to the films of Gore Vidal. Why Vidal? I couldn’t really say.

The allusions are all clear enough. There is a mural-sized movie poster for an imagined sequel to “Suddenly, Last Summer,” an installation meant to simulate a casting room for “Myra Breckinridge” and portraits of about a dozen actors who have appeared in other films -- but they never quite synthesize into anything very meaningful.

Asked in a February New York Times article about some criticism he apparently received for “Trailer” after its premiere at the Venice Biennale in 2005, Vezzoli said he took it as a compliment. “It means they didn’t get the joke,” he said, “and to me that is an achievement.”

That may be true, but I’m not sure it’s anything to boast about.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

Sophisticated, yet playful, collages

The roughly 14 collages in Julie Kirkpatrick’s solo debut at Black Dragon Society offer the heartening glimpse of a young artist hitting her stride. Working with small -- sometimes tiny -- slivers of cut colored paper, some hand-painted with patterns before the cutting, she builds each letter-size surface into a lively, fantastical sort of landscape peppered with flowers, birds and other charmingly girlish embellishments.

Her palette, different in every piece, is playful but subtly sophisticated. Her compositions are tight and dynamic, giddily eye-catching but equally rewarding of sustained attention.

The collages make up about half of the exhibition. The paintings that make up the other half are much larger but considerably less confident.

The dynamics of the scale seem to elude Kirkpatrick. In her struggle simply to cover the surface of each canvas, she loses the taut centrifugal force that holds the collages together. The works end up feeling rather thin, even unfinished.

That said, the pleasures of the collage work far outweigh the shortcomings of the paintings, and indeed leave these shortcomings feeling less like a distraction than an avenue through which to anticipate future developments.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 620-0030, through May 20. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.