A message in the starkness

Jutta Koether is not a painter who is particularly shy with color. Indeed, the tone of her palette over the last decade has tended to fall somewhere between jubilant and hysterical, with shrill reds battling queasy yellows, cake-frosting pinks and electric acid greens in fevered, Expressionistic compositions.

In her current show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, however, Koether has forsaken color altogether. Thirteen predominantly black canvases are characterized by a profusion of broad, frenetic brush strokes, scattered knots of scratchy white lines and a few stray fragments of enigmatic text.

The show’s press release situates the work in the context of what it refers to as Koether’s “search for productive dissent,” and on this level -- conceptually -- the paintings make a very compelling case. There are no explicit political references, but the project feels nonetheless quite topical: a cogent response to the state of global tension perpetuated by the ongoing violence in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is clearly not Koether’s sole intention, but it’s an effective one. The act of draining the color from a gallery exhibition at a time of war comes across as a logical and eloquent gesture of protest, something like draping the mirrors of a household in black during a period of mourning.

Despite the absence of color, the paintings are exceptionally energetic. This isn’t an elegant or romantic sort of black, not the black of deep space or existential nothingness but rather the scuffed and dingy black on the stages and floors of nightclubs. It’s punk rock black, nihilistic but full of fervor.

Koether is a musician as well as a painter -- she’s collaborated on multiple occasions with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth -- and there’s definitely a performative element at play here. The improvisational vigor of the brush strokes underscores the intense involvement of the artist’s body. You can almost see Koether’s arms waving across the surface of the canvas.

To the extent that the paintings can be considered political, this is perhaps their most poignant message: a humanistic affirmation of the individual gesture. “I am here,” the artist seems to be declaring, “I exist” -- which, in the face of war, is a significant statement.

One senses as well evidence of a classic battle -- the artist’s furtive struggle to shape the blackness, to draw something up out of nothing, to create. Whether there might also be some irony in this essentially romantic position is difficult to say.

For all this energy, however, the presence of the objects is disappointingly thin. The paint is thin, with no real texture and a bland matte finish. The canvases are also thin, and not especially large -- or not large enough, at any rate (48 by 60 inches), to give the impression of dominating the room, which is what they seem to want to do. What should be a resounding, in-your-face, punk rock confrontation thus winds up feeling dishearteningly provisional and polite.

It is a subtle shortcoming but significant. If the works are intended as protest, they need to have the presence -- to be big enough, heavy enough, determined enough -- to stand up to the thing they’re protesting. At least they need to stand up to the viewer -- to attempt to shake us out of the complacency that is allowing that thing to go on. Though compelling on many levels, these works fall decidedly short of soul-shaking.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Aug. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.vielmetter.com

Looking beneath the surface

The work in Colombian artist Leyla Cardenas’ elegant exhibition at d.e.n. contemporary art, her first in the U.S., is a curious spin on the concept of graffiti. If a graffiti artist carries her materials out into the world to make her mark on the surfaces of other people’s walls, what Cardenas does is basically the inverse. She takes the surfaces of other people’s walls back into her studio to make their mark on her own work.

Cardenas collects these surfaces by applying sheets of a strong adhesive to the walls of decaying buildings and pulling up as many layers of paint and plaster as happen to come loose. She then arranges these fragments into various semi-sculptural configurations.

In several works, she’s mounted them behind or between mid-size sheets of clear plexiglass, which she floats several inches off the gallery wall using slender metal pins. In “Inside Out,” she’s suspended the fragments on long sections of wall-mounted wire so that they hang and sway like a cluster of exotic blossoms.

In the show’s biggest and most graceful work, “Withholding,” Cardenas arranges an assortment of mostly larger fragments on pins a few inches above the concrete floor to create a floating archipelago that’s then echoed in a faint line-drawing on the wall above. Several dozen thin black threads stem from the edges of these fragments to the ceiling at various angles, drawing the maplike arrangement into three dimensions.

For the show’s one other large-scale work, “Desen-volvi-miento or Seven Layers Outward,” Cardenas applied the same process to an old ladder. She pulled up five successive layers of wood grain, four of which she mounts on the wall and one that she floats on pins on the floor.

The wood adds an interesting variation but ultimately isn’t as powerful as the paint and plaster, which have a poetic force of their own -- one that Cardenas is adept at channeling. She includes photographs of the buildings from which the fragments were taken, which give a sense of context; but ultimately the material speaks for itself, exuding the character of age and experience.

d.e.n. contemporary art, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, through Aug. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.dencontemporaryart.com

Differing views on the L.A. landscape

Laura Ricci and Jennifer Celio, both showing at Bandini Art, approach the same general subject -- the L.A. landscape -- from distinctly different angles.

Ricci, who was born in the Midwest and professes in her statement to have “an admittedly uneasy relationship with habitation in Los Angeles,” is the skeptic. Motivated by “the general political climate, looming prospects of cataclysmic earthquakes” and her intuition that nature is getting angry, she envisions in her paintings a sort of revenge: trees crushing freeways, binding up automobiles and stretching their limbs across vast empty spaces. Loose and whimsical, the works -- acrylic, ink and pencil on paper -- have a storybook charm.

Celio, born in Burbank, is considerably more sympathetic, viewing the city’s roads and freeways not as spaces of absence but as windows into her own history. Her beautifully articulated graphite drawings, executed on large gesso-covered boards, present snapshot glimpses of roadside landscapes floating in fields of white. The scenes are banal at a glance but rendered with such affection and care that they come to feel almost hallowed.

Bandini Art, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave., Culver City, (310) 837-6230, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.bandiniart.com

Reaching a happy and peaceful note

It’s difficult to imagine a better note on which to end the straggling summer season than German painter Bernd Mechler’s U.S. solo debut at the Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Flashy enough to catch the eye, charming enough to hold it, lively enough to spur conversation and smart enough to warrant your respect in the morning, the seven paintings in this intensely appealing exhibition may not change your life, but they’ll certainly leave you in high spirits.

All of the works are oil on canvas. Some, however, look persuasively like spray paint, suggesting wild bouts of inarticulate graffiti.

Others approximate a child’s experiments with digital painting software, with the pigment smeared slightly as if by a faulty printer. The colors are cheerful and lighthearted, the compositions buoyant.

Beneath all this liveliness, however, each piece has a sound internal harmony. It lends a striking quality of serenity.

Christopher Grimes, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cgrimes.com