Primitive hidden in the modern

Florian Maier-Aichen gives an obvious nod to Edward Ruscha in his photograph “20th Century Fox,” the smallest of eight mostly large-scale works from 2005 at Blum & Poe Gallery. It shows the famous movie-studio logo, sliced by a crisscrossed web of scanning searchlights.

In 1962, Ruscha used the cinema logo to emphasize an up-to-the-minute, all-American graphic design, neatly throwing a monkey wrench into our assumptions about the relative merits of fine versus applied arts. By contrast, the German-born L.A. artist heads in a different direction.

Maier-Aichen’s picture is soft, gray and nostalgic in its evocation of pre-1939 black-and-white movies. And it does not seem to reproduce a film still. Instead, it appears to be a photograph of a carefully executed graphite drawing in which a film still served as model. In this process of homage, Ruscha gets admiringly transformed into something approaching an old master.

The piece also underlines the poetic strategy that operates throughout Maier-Aichen’s compelling photographs: Merging digital imagery with drawing, he melds art’s newest medium with its oldest. The result is a developing body of work that is ruminative and slow. The sweep of historical time is absorbed into the instantaneous world of camera work.

One picture shows an old factory smokestack crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust and debris. Whether the collapse was recorded by the camera’s lens as it happened or was fabricated digitally and occurred only in a virtual realm, the passage of the industrial era is what Maier-Aichen pictures.

He even adds a classical twist. The form of the smokestack recalls a Doric column, lending the ruin the authoritative grandeur of an ancient Greek temple. The distance we have traveled from the Machine Age to the Digital Era is one measure of our postmodernity.

Among the show’s most beautiful pictures is a view from above of what appears to be a primordial tidal pool, where primitive life at the edge of the sea encloses worlds within worlds. A second look, however, shows that the image is not a watery close-up at all.

In fact, “Above June Lake,” 2005, is an aerial view of a ski area in the mountains, with lakes and trees rendered in inky blacks and glowing reds through some undisclosed technology. (Perhaps the satellite-style image was made with infrared techniques.) Here the distance we’ve traveled from our industrial past is measured in light-years, which is appropriate to a camera technology that employs analog and digital qualities of luminosity. What’s bracing is that Maier-Aichen’s faux tidal pool -- a slow swirl at the edge of a mythic sea -- also asserts the primitivism of our newly emerging world.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, Through Saturday. www.blumandpoe.com

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Transformation caught on video

Ryan Trecartin is only 24 and having his solo gallery debut. But already he’s been likened to the legendary Jack Smith (1932-1989), whose 1961 “Flaming Creatures” ignited the underground Pop cinema movement. The comparison is heady.

Based on this flaming creature’s 40-minute video at QED Gallery, however, it is also apt. Trecartin’s terrific video, “A Family Finds Entertainment,” melds anarchic energy with a thrift-store aesthetic. Its parentage includes the work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Jason Rhoades to such a degree that the Texas-born artist, displaced to Southern California from his home in New Orleans last year by Hurricane Katrina, seems right at home in L.A.

What’s the specific narrative in “A Family Finds Entertainment”? Beats me. It has something to do with a misfit young man who leaves his domestic environment, gets run over by a car and is born again -- this time as a girl. (A tag at the end dedicates the video “to my Mom and Dad.”) Emerging from an ingrained cultural assumption that all media is fiction, it sets a stage where the nuclear family undergoes nuclear fission. Transformation is embraced.

“I made this chair in Photoshop,” the protagonist remarks -- not once but twice -- as he gestures with a chair. The phrase wryly encapsulates a liberating malleability of identity, which courses through the video. The lighting is lurid, the camera angle is usually akimbo and the cropping is always tight. No shot lasts longer than a few moments, and the imagery seems ready to burst at the seams. It’s like a wild ride through Trecartin’s agitated, joyously media-addled brain.

So is the installation of otherwise rather pedestrian sculptures and paintings that fills the gallery to overflowing. Produced (like the video) collaboratively with friends, the assemblages celebrate the hot-glue gun as rightful heir to the blowtorch and the bronze foundry. From the ceiling a suspended papier-mache figure impaled on an abstract painting is titled “Art Lover,” neatly summarizing the manic obsessiveness of today’s artistic enterprise.

Still, the video is the thing. In style it naturally departs from Smith’s ethereal precedent by being suburban rather than urban, more Goth than Pop and digital rather than analog in sensibility. Trecartin lives, after all, in a new millennium.

What makes its claustrophobic stream-of-consciousness work, however, is the video’s tone, which it certainly shares with “Flaming Creatures.” At once innocent and jaded, it suggests that the family that finds entertainment together might likewise find candor and compassion together. No wonder it’s lovingly dedicated to Mom and Dad.

QED Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 204-3334, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.qedgallery.com

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Realist images of idealism

Leon Golub (1922-2004) was of a generation of American artists for whom the materials of painting became metaphors for the human body. Canvas was a skin stretched over a skeleton of stretcher bars, and paint was a substance as mysterious and vivid as any life force.

At Griffin Contemporary, a slight selection of seven small paintings, made between 1968 and 1983 (and none apparently exhibited before), gives a modest indication of Golub’s brilliant twist on the metaphor. Known for astringent political subject matter -- often dealing with the persistent human rituals of torture and thus tragically timely now -- he removed his canvas from its stretchers to let it hang limp, like flayed skin.

The artist was a lifelong student of classical Greek mythology. Perhaps this technique derived from the gruesome story of Marsyas, the flute player who lost a musical contest with Apollo and was skinned alive for daring to challenge the god of art and symbol of idealized beauty.

The show’s most remarkable painting is a portrait head, “The Heretic’s Fork.” The title refers to a bondage device of forged iron that rings the neck. At the front, one pair of sharp iron prongs rises up beneath the victim’s jaw, while another descends to rest near the collarbone. Move the head in any direction and the man is impaled.

This torture victim is a black man. With his head tilted up and his eyes cast aloft toward heaven, he forms a canonical, almost Social Realist image of sentimentalized idealism.

But Golub’s powerful little painting is a grindingly complex image of inhumanity, not some bland cliche. This man, head encased by the heretic’s fork, assumes his pose of righteousness upon pain of mutilation and death. Brutality can result from enforced glorification, this painting asserts, just as surely as from degradation.

Griffin Contemporary, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6886, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.griffincontemporary.com

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Paints reflect shape of canvas

Twelve recent paintings by Marcia Roberts submit one compositional format to different color combinations. A familiar aesthetic of light and space is given a refreshing, sensual spin.

Roberts’ paintings at Rosamund Felsen Gallery use the external shape of the canvas as the source for their internal image. A rectangular plane appears to tilt back on the diagonal, floating within a space of atmospheric color.

On an opposite diagonal, a glow of light creates an almost metallic sheen across the surface. Where the color in the floating plane is dark, the surrounding atmosphere is light -- and vice versa. Space flips and flops, expands and contracts, and the color assumes a remarkable luminosity.

One of the nicest touches in this work is tucked around the corner: Roberts paints the sides of the unframed stretcher in what appears to be the same basic hue as the internal floating plane. This contrasting color anchors the material object suspended on the wall, just as it tethers the illusionistic object pictured within the painting. The device is emblematic of the holistic thoroughness and care she puts into these lovely works.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com