Painting can speak in many tongues

“Painting in Tongues” is a group exhibition featuring seven artists chosen for their distinctive inquiries into painting’s current dialects. Yet because each artist has been given his or her own gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the show opened Sunday, it also has the look of a collection of seven solo shows.

Strangely enough, when you’re in a MOCA gallery perusing one artist’s work, you might momentarily think there’s been some mistake. Works in each room can vary so widely as to belie the likelihood that one artist made them all.

Is this a group show of seven singular artists? Or is this a singular show assembled from seven group shows?

Maybe it’s a bit of both.

Take Mark Grotjahn. Among his 16 works is “Untitled (Angry Flower),” a big, goofy-looking canvas in which a long, skinny green stem wends its way up the right side. It looks like a vine reaching toward the sky.

Two clownish faces -- both oddly reminiscent of a Richard Nixon caricature -- grow like strange blossoms from the stem. Each flower-face sports an enormous, pendulous brown nose, wedged between Picasso-style eyes. One nose is three-dimensional, and it hangs turd-like from the canvas.

“Untitled (Angry Flower)” was made in 2004. So were the paintings installed on each side. Stylistically, they look like three different artists might have made them.

At the right, “Untitled (Black Butterfly Over Green)” is wholly nonfigurative. It’s composed from radiating wedges of black oil paint over lime green under-paint, which can be glimpsed along the edges of the canvas.

To the left, “Untitled (Face)” is an intricate linear web, somewhat like the veins of a leaf. Glaring eyes appear to be embedded in it, like creatures peering out from the jungle.

Stylistic continuity does not mark Grotjahn’s compelling work. But neither do these very different paintings seem executed at random. Instead, what emerges from all three is a notion of painting as a kind of mask.

Does laying paint over canvas reveal or disguise? Does it identify character, hidden within, or does it project personality outward? Is it false or true, an exaggeration or an authentic trace, an element of play or a mark of deceit?

By demolishing stylistic coherence, Grotjahn’s art suggests that painting is all these things and more. Down at the other end of the room, a wall features a group of actual masks crudely assembled by Grotjahn from cardboard boxes, toilet paper tubes and slathered paint. Childlike yet sophisticated, they underscore the proposition.

Coherency of style as an artistic virtue came under full-scale assault early in the 1980s. MOCA curator Michael Darling, who organized “Painting in Tongues,” aptly identifies Gerhard Richter as a pivotal artist in this attack on a cherished assumption of Modernist art. In the late 1960s, the German artist began to switch back and forth among exquisitely figurative painting, crisp geometric abstraction and explosive gestural abstraction. Two’s company, but three’s a crowd: Prominence was denied to any one of them.

Richter grew up in East Germany, where Socialist Realism was enforced by the state as the appropriate visual language for art. He knew the limitations of style. But that rigid enforcement also helped him cast a jaundiced eye on the supposed stylistic freedom enjoyed by painters in the West, where the pressures of artistic brand identity in the marketplace limited the possibilities in a different way. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, style was a prison.

The seven artists in this show are all “post-Richter,” born within a few years on either side of 1970. Their entry into art school or the art world coincided with his canonization as a crucial painter. Today, dismissing a unitary style is less a rule-breaking adventure than an institutionalized mannerism. Pluralism, which usually refers to an embrace of social diversity within the confines of a common civilization, has been absorbed within artistic practice.

How pluralist has painting become? Well, so pluralist that paint doesn’t even need to be present.

The show’s most flamboyant work is Anselm Reyle’s bright, glowing tangle of neon tubes suspended from the ceiling. Perhaps its most modest is a large, ethereal Color Field abstraction stitched from thread by Ivan Morley. Among its most captivating is a short video by Rodney McMillian. (The video is installed right behind McMillian’s twin black towers topped by screaming stuffed monkeys.) Each work refers to painting without employing paint.

The airborne scribble of neon in Reyle’s sculpture acknowledges gestural painting. But the highly stylized composition is inspired less by Jackson Pollock, freewheeling American symbol of avant-garde success, than Georges Mathieu, Parisian symbol of second-string impersonation. Reyle’s art is Neo-Pop.

Morley’s stitched abstraction alludes to traditions of landscape painting, and you can almost make out hills, trees, fields and flowers among the otherwise abstract color-splotches of densely sewn thread. But the needlework yields a strange souvenir quality -- like some homemade quilt on steroids, commemorating lost experience. The work is titled “Smog.”

McMillian’s video, shown on a clunky monitor set atop a dolly, is virtually abstract. For several minutes a large white cloth flaps about furiously in darkness. You imagine a sleeping person tangled in the sheets and having a bad dream or, alternatively, a ghost trapped inside the machine. In the context of painting, it becomes an artist wrestling with an empty canvas.

As pluralism was being internalized in the 1980s, art was also becoming internationalized. Without fanfare, “Painting in Tongues” quietly maps the new geography that has emerged. It includes three artists from Los Angeles and two each from Germany and Great Britain.

New York was commonly considered the world’s leading town for painting, ever since Abstract Expressionism led the avant-garde out from under the rubble of World War II. Today, a half-dozen wars on, that romantic fiction is but a pretty memory clouded with smog.

Cologne artist Kai Althoff uses painting in a disarmingly manipulative way. Lining the gallery are more than two dozen works, both figurative and abstract, and most are infused with a whiff of fin de siecle morbidity. Often they’re conceived as much like furnishings as art.

One is veiled behind a lace shawl, the way a piano in a Victorian drawing room might be. Another is a patterned silk scarf, artfully piled on the floor. And speaking of the floor, Althoff has carpeted the gallery wall to wall, raising the question of public versus private space.

He’s also hung his paintings low, so that a visitor is required to bow down to see them. When doing so, the feeling of exposure is discomfiting.

Althoff crosses painting with installation art. He has also composed a surprisingly compelling scenario that crosses seduction with a demand: Pay attention!

Lucy McKenzie’s work attempts a similar effect in a wholly different way but without much success.

McKenzie’s popularity on the international circuit is among art’s minor mysteries, and this installation does little to clear it up. A routine Conceptual artist, she welds together vernacular imagery drawn from advertising, comics, graffiti, snapshots, shadows on the wall -- virtually anything that does not come with the old-fashioned baggage of High Art -- to create visual absurdities. For example, a large preparatory drawing for a mural appears to be a billboard advertising a deodorant that makes a girl’s underarm hair as delicious as spaghetti to bright-eyed young men.

Um, OK.

Gillian Carnegie is perhaps the most painterly painter of the seven, and her eight exceptional paintings are quiet and unassuming. Her application of oil-based pigments to paper or canvas, intimate or grand, is deliberate in the extreme.

Think bricks and mortar. A modest portrait of a man is built from calculated strokes of pale paint the way a fortress wall might be assembled to withstand the slings and arrows of centuries.

In Carnegie’s capable hands mark-making is inseparable from image-making, the way the forest is indivisible from the trees.

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‘Painting in Tongues’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Ends: April 17

Price: $8 adults, $5 students and seniors, free 11 and younger, free after 5 p.m. Thursdays

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org