An artist and his studio come alive

Southern California audiences have not had a chance to immerse themselves in William Kentridge’s richly absorbing world for several years, since the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted a traveling survey of his work in 2002. In 2003, the internationally acclaimed South African artist made a batch of new films, which the Museum of Contemporary Art acquired the next year and is now exhibiting, for the first time in Los Angeles, at its Pacific Design Center site.

In his drawings, prints, collages, animated films, theater and opera productions, Kentridge’s attention has always focused inward and outward -- on the moral liquidity of the self and on shifting political, social and physical landscapes. His work has vast emotional and technical scope but remains anchored in the travails of the individual soul.

In the films at MOCA, Kentridge has contracted his field of vision to the space of his studio. And with a few brief exceptions, he has reduced his cast of characters to one: himself. As ever, though, Kentridge’s imagery expands exponentially in the mind and in memory. Even short, comical sequences featuring the artist at work press into complex philosophical territory. Visually they’re delectable -- coy, poignant, playful and wise.

Nine related films are simultaneously projected onto the walls of the large gallery. Two are discrete projects, each six or seven minutes long, and the other seven (from one to five minutes each) form a suite of “fragments” in homage to French filmmaker Georges Melies (1861-1938).

A theater owner and magician, Melies became captivated with the technology of filmmaking when it was introduced in 1895. Over the following two decades, he made more than 500 short, silent, black-and-white films using a variety of special effects that he developed, including stop-action techniques, dissolves and multiple exposures. He often staged interactions between multiples of himself and appeared to bring inanimate objects to life. A consummate trickster, he knitted together the magical properties of sleight of hand, live theater and motion pictures.

Kentridge does much the same in his amusing, often transfixing odes to Melies. He plays the artist-conjurer, orchestrating fabulous transformations whereby drawn images merge into live action, and everything within the frame seems invested with a will of its own.

In one of the “Fragments,” we look over the artist’s shoulder at a clean sheet of paper on a drawing table. The artist appears to draw, but no image emerges. Then he opens his hands over the paper as if making a gentle offering and a silhouetted figure appears on the sheet. In the brief course of the film, images are made and unmade, but not in the usual cause-and-effect order.

Some sequences are played back in reverse but seamlessly integrated among the rest, so that the act of creation takes on mysterious unpredictability. What makes an image materialize is sometimes the hand, sometimes pure will and desire. In these films the artist’s studio is at once laboratory, incubator, cell and stage. Tedium vies with inspiration. Anxiety hovers. Kentridge paces, waits, drinks coffee, does and undoes.

In the studio, the artist defines and transforms himself, physically and metaphorically. In one “Fragment,” he reassembles a full-scale drawing of himself from torn sections. When it’s restored, Kentridge gives the mirror-image drawing a wary glance before walking away. The drawn version then comes to life and nonchalantly exits.

Kentridge, dressed in white shirt and dark pants, plays a Keaton-esque humble bumbler, navigating the gray area between illusion and reality with a straight face and earnest temperament. Part laborer, part magician, he is also a dreamer steeped in yearning in “Voyage to the Moon.” In “Day for Night,” the slightest entry in the bunch, Kentridge is nearly a doodler playing with the reversal of tones, using the choreographed movement of ants to draw white-on-black patterns on screen.

Work this heavily influenced and self-referential could suffer from slack integrity. Kentridge, though, discourses brilliantly with his artist-ancestors. Lush drawing, exquisite timing and persistent conceptual probing make these works utterly commanding and fully his own. Having nine separate projections running continuously in one gallery encourages grazing behavior, but the show is a sumptuous feast that should not be hurried.

MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 26. Closed Monday. www.moca.org

A meditation

on loss of space

Jeff Brouws’ photographs come from love and worry, and at their best they elicit the same. An ardent admirer of the vernacular and obsolete, he has photographed drive-in theaters, old signage, shuttered factories and declining urban centers across the country. He also chronicles, with evident sorrow, what has risen in their place: homogenous housing developments and generic big-box malls.

“Approaching Nowhere,” a selection of images from 2000-05 at Craig Krull Gallery, coheres into a moving meditation on the loss of place and texture in the contemporary American landscape. Working along the lines of Wright Morris and Walker Evans, Brouws photographs the vernacular like a portraitist concisely extracting character. His images of an Ohio diner interior and a Montana roadhouse read as tender acts of preservation.

Broad cultural and economic shifts are at work behind the scenes Brouws photographs, and his commentary for a forthcoming book details his interest in the sociology of place. The images may be dense with political content, but they have a formal clarity that is often stunning.

Brouws is an astute colorist, his palette of gleaming primaries in one image or stolid grays in another intensifying his take on each slice of Americana. The depth of the work owes as much to his perceptions of the country’s changing face as to concern for the shifting shape of its soul.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Driven by

his ambition

John White Cerasulo is a young Brooklyn-based artist who channels 19th century painters, with a decidedly 21st century attitude. Like too many recent art school graduates, his practice resembles a doomed, closed ecology: Ambition to find his place within art history fuels his art, and his art is about little more than that ambition.

In Cerasulo’s first solo show in L.A., at Sandroni Rey, he cites several of his sources (John Singer Sargent, Lawrence Kilburn), but fails to muster a consistently independent vision. He paints still-lifes and landscapes in a brooding palette of inky grays and burnt sienna, inserting his image into each scene, usually awkwardly.

His tilted head joins the lineup of cordial glasses, coffee cup and flower vases in one oddly stilted interior. In another he’s a comic presence, wide-eyed and reclining underneath a subdued tabletop still-life.

Cerasulo’s touch feels uncertain, noncommittal, which weakens his own presence in paintings that are, ostensibly, about his artistic identity. The painterly ambivalence is echoed in his habit of titling works and also labeling them as untitled, as in “Untitled, Sketching You Painting Me.” Small and unassuming, the painting is the most engaging in the show. In it, the artist appears seated in a boat on a dark and misty Whistlerian night. Glancing up from his drawing pad as if to survey us, Cerasulo stages an encounter across time and place that feels at once natural and uncanny.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 280-0111, through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.sandronirey.com

Paring down the

visual essentials

Mark Citret’s thoroughly pleasant photographs at White Room wrest significance from unlikely sources. They are not major statements on lofty subjects. Quite the opposite: They are small, quiet pictures that acutely observe the everyday.

Citret is as likely to find a handsome harmony of forms in a public restroom as in a garden. One of the images in this selection spanning 15 years shows a receding row of portable toilets. Its composition is as crisp and distilled as a nearby picture of a single leaf glued by moisture to the hood of a truck.

Citret practices landscape photography of the most inclusive sort, encompassing the urban, industrial and synthetic, the unintentionally beautiful as well as the innately so. There’s no flab in his pictures, nothing extraneous or gratuitous.

A Bay Area photographer, Citret has the sensibility of a Post-minimalist: He pares down to the essentials of plane, line, pattern, rhythm, light and shadow, but within that clean geometry he recognizes the presence of chance, organic processes of change and a hint of pathos.

The coexistence of order and chaos is neatly visualized in a photograph of an open phone book, its pages in swollen, crinkly disarray. It’s set against the cool order of a cinderblock wall with twin pipes curving down like arrows pointing to the anomaly. What Citret does too is point to readily available secrets. Each image is akin to a nod of recognition, slight but refreshing.

White Room Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 859-2402, through Feb. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.whiteroomgallery.com