Paintings that will make motors run

How is seeing a gallery show different from embarking on a fresh courtship? It’s not, really. In both circumstances, we encounter a potential beloved, the introduction suffused with promise, hope, expectation. We want to be seduced by appearance, impressed by depth, awed by the integrity of the total package.

Prepare to be smitten, then, if you visit Rosamund Felsen Gallery in the next few weeks. The Kaz Oshiro and Dan Douke show has it all -- and a great sense of humor.

Oshiro was Douke’s student at Cal State L.A., so the pairing makes sense as an homage and illustration of transmission and generational continuity. It works, brilliantly, because both artists riff on a single theme (car culture), compounding the resonance that already exists between their work.

Each of the three rooms in the gallery is similarly filled: There are cardboard boxes on the floor and tailgates from Toyota pickup trucks leaning against the walls. The place looks like a lightly stocked warehouse or a body shop that’s been picked over. This initial misreading is inevitable. Oshiro and Douke’s paintings register as the things they represent, not as what they actually are: pigment on canvas.

Both artists take trompe l’oeil illusionism to a thrilling extreme. Douke has been at it for decades. (A survey exhibition of his work from the 1970s to the present continues at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A. through Saturday.) His stretched canvas constructions are sized, textured and painted to achieve exquisite fidelity to sealed and scuffed cartons of motor oil, engine degreaser and other automotive products.

Viewed while standing, they are entirely what they pretend to be. Only when squatting or bending to examine more closely does the illusion slip, but even then only slightly. The weave of the canvas shows around the edges, but otherwise the boxes’ shipping labels, packing tape and product information hums with authenticity.

At once, these paintings are sculptures, Duchampian Ready-mades and echoes of the ordinary, worn ingredients that went into Beat-era assemblages.

Douke also shows a canvas that masquerades astoundingly as a sheet of plywood propped against the wall. The wood-grain pattern painted on the surface and the striation suggested along the sides ring familiar and true, as do common marks of use -- a grimy black shoe print near the bottom and a similar trace of tire tread toward the top.

Oshiro’s tailgates, painted on shaped canvases, mimic those seen on the road, personalized with stickers and letters of the “Toyota” name painted out. Different paint jobs and levels of wear and tear also distinguish them. Oshiro flaunts a spectacular range of variants, using only paint and Bondo, a material used in car repairs.

One of the doors is painted emerald green and appears encrusted in dust, with “wash me” and a play on selected Toyota letters fingered in the grime. A tailgate in metallic turquoise bears an appropriately hip Smiths sticker and two pitch-perfect bird droppings, solid splats on the upper edge of the door and milky drips down the front.

Two groups of tailgate doors that Oshiro pocks with bullet holes fail to convince, and paintings on paper of a few California vanity plates are unremarkable. Throughout, however, Oshiro displays the same extraordinary facility as Douke at rendering texture and telling details.

Between his acute observations and preternatural skills, Oshiro’s tailgates come to read as portraits of class, profession and personality akin to the autobiographical and highly illusionistic still lifes of letters, photographs and other ephemera by 19th century American painters Harnett, Peto and Haberle.

Oshiro gives a more explicit nod of influence to planks by John McCracken, as Douke does to the cubes of Donald Judd and the Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol. One of Oshiro’s tailgates even makes a joke about tofu’s resemblance to the Minimalist cube and amends a sticker to read “I (frowning face) Judd.”

Oshiro and Douke are maximalists, exercising finesse that in another time and place would result in the opulent splendor of Faberge eggs but here is applied to common, everyday subjects, the average Joes of the material world. The frisson is palpable, the conscious disconnect canny. This is one fabulous, sophisticated romp of a show.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com

The word on presenting nudes

Fiona Banner’s briefly compelling new work at 1301PE is an exercise in translation. The London-based artist presents nudes -- verbally, rather than visually. In each large graphite drawing, her written description of a female nude runs continuously from top to bottom of the page.

In “Smokey Nude,” white block letters stream over hazy gray ground: “One leg crooked, her arse swaying out to the left so the skin folds where her ribs meet her hip. Face soaked in shadow ... “ and so on. Banner chronicles each model’s appearance in terms of form, mass, light and shadow. Her observations don’t approach clinical neutrality, but neither do they amass any emotional, much less erotic charge -- which seems part of her intent.

She shifts the dynamic between artist and model, from the traditional male-acting-upon-female to a more level gaze, woman to woman, but the tinge of sexual politics doesn’t make the work any more interesting.

Banner makes a few coy gestures as well -- titling a piece that faces the corner “Shy Nude” and another upright in the middle of the room “Standing Nude” -- but those don’t go far either. The work grows thin rather quickly, though it generates questions with lasting intellectual spark, having to do with equivalence (or lack thereof) between visual and verbal experience, the possibility (or impossibility) of exact transcription and the phenomenon of seeing a text versus reading an image.

1301PE, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 938-5822, through Jan. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.1301PE.com

Pairing ovals and aerial views

An invigorating show at Angles pairs two young L.A. painters, both new to the gallery.

Susanna Maing wrests unexpected vibrancy from a relatively simple format based on repeated oval forms. The ovals cohere in a grid shorn of geometric rigidity. It wavers and ripples like a curtain or scrim, its buzzing color combinations and off-register alignment like a Marimekko pattern gone trippily astray.

The ovals and their star-shaped interstices teasingly battle for dominance, mint versus tangerine, brick against lime. Maing invests the patterns with taut muscularity but at the same time a breathless ethereality, an inclusive sensuality alluding to flavor, temperature, sound. The affinity between abstract art and music comes alive in these paintings, all rhythm and syncopation, pattern and deviation, the work of a spirited visual percussionist.

Nikko Mueller’s intriguing paintings extrapolate from aerial views of residential neighborhoods and industrial complexes. Mueller keys each image to a narrow color scheme and builds up paint in layered planes to articulate structures. The works bring to mind both relief and topographical maps, subtly infused with editorial slant.

Mueller doesn’t identify specific places, so the sites read as types.

“Grip” appears to depict an affluent neighborhood of large, widely spaced homes on curving canyon or hilltop streets. The colors and patterns of the surrounding landscape hint of military camouflage.

In “Creamsicle,” Mueller paints a more mainstream subdivision, its houses smaller and tightly packed onto streets that don’t conform to the natural landscape. Hued in tones of chalky peach, the scene feels enveloped in a mist of homogeneity. Mueller’s acts of surveillance stem from ambivalence: He seems as enamored of the built environment’s systems and patterns as he is disenchanted by their use as mechanisms for social control.

Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

Leading into some very dark places

Positioning the viewer at the foot of a path or road that leads deeper into pictorial space is a long-established compositional device. In his noirish photographs at Rose Gallery, Todd Hido offers this kind of access into scenes that are otherwise not very inviting: bleak, wet landscapes; dead ends; dark passages.

Most of the large color prints strike a brooding note -- the same note, repeated, without much complexity or variance. Melancholy skies and gritty asphalt prevail, punctuated by a tipping row of utility poles in one picture, a lone, barren tree in another.

Part lonely wanderer, part romantic pictorialist, Hido treats raindrops on the windshield he’s shooting through as if they were precious tears, evidence of the emotional import of the moment.

The “Roaming” pictures span a period of 10 years, accumulated while Hido was making several other series of work. At their best, they evoke an outsider’s sensibility (shades of Robert Frank), or the graphic immediacy of a charcoal sketch. Most, however, feel slight -- overdramatized notes from a journey, not significant destinations in themselves.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosegallery.net