Witty, odd and hopeful

A perceptive critic once aptly characterized a Steve Hurd painting as a “drunken Trojan Horse.” That wasn’t the painting’s image but a description of the way his art operates: He pulls right up to the enemy gate with an audacious subterfuge, but he’s making too much sloppy noise to get away with anything heroic.

For art the enemy fortress is mass culture, which hogs society’s spotlight while rarely making good on grandiose promises. Mass culture is a mess, Hurd’s paintings assert, but so is art culture. When his gambit works the effect is bracing because it refuses a common artistic tendency to talk down from a privileged height. Witty, often pretty and usually odd, Hurd’s paintings suggest that all one can finally do is tend his own garden, invite people in and hope for the best.

For his first solo exhibition in seven years, and his first ever at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Hurd is showing a strong group of 18 new paintings. Some depict advertising circulars of the kind he has painted before. (These are for cheap picture frames, signifying that painting is a frame for action.) All of them retain the thinned, runny, dripping oil paint that is a hallmark of his “post-painterly-Pop” style.

Two are startling close-ups of a man’s mouth. The slurred grin, all luscious bruised color, is like a Joan Mitchell landscape abstraction as described by Foster Brooks.

Like Gerhard Richter, Hurd switches back and forth between representational painting and pure abstraction. Since the 1960s the German artist has been mulling the efficacy of painting and the nature of perceptual experience in a world fully dominated by the camera’s lens; the American is nudging that meditation along, moving it into the digital ether.

One painting records a banal art discussion downloaded from an Internet blog page. (The page is flopped on the canvas, as if you’re reading it from the other side of the computer screen -- metaphorically inside the blogger’s prosaic head.) Most of the rest are based on images that have been scanned, digitized and vastly enlarged, so that the picture is composed from colorful and incongruous blocks of runny pixels.

The effect is disorienting, partly because the image is removed just enough from the norm that one knows, instinctively, that it can be pulled into view with a little effort. For example a security camera image of the brazen daylight theft from a Norwegian museum of Edvard Munch’s renowned masterpiece of modern alienation, “The Scream,” is lovely, puzzling, funny, shocking, contemplative and absurd -- almost all at once. Perceptually, the experience is like an idea dawning and slowly sinking in.

Other pixel-shattered paintings show American military funerals and cemeteries. Virtual death never looked so heart-rending and lush. The flag-draped caskets remind us that we almost never see that image in today’s mass media, even though thousands of body bags have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The chunky pixels remind us that the Pentagon developed the Internet. Paint reminds us what we valorize.

Still, it’s the big abstractions that steal Hurd’s show. Based on small pencil or ballpoint scribbles and each subtitled “Outburst,” the huge enlargements of interlocking, nested and squared-off loops recall nothing so much as Mondrian’s apple trees crossed with Pollock’s drips and filtered through Twombly’s doodles.

The human agitation embodied in a scribble collides with the blank indifference of electronic technology, while the painting enacts radiant, delectable reconciliation. These works bring monumental frustration into stunning view, an opportune image that summarizes our historical moment.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com.

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Disconcerting world views

Given tables filled with handmade ‘zines, lots of paper push-pinned to the walls and grainy videos flickering in the corners, “Bring the War Home” has a temporal, throwaway, samizdat quality, like an underground meeting for the distribution of secret pamphlets during a time of government-scrutinized activity. (“All Americans,” to borrow the chilling words of former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, “need to watch what they say.”) At the same time, the packed installation of often wistful ephemera at QED Gallery recalls nothing so much as the soulful street shrines that sprang up all over New York City almost five years ago, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center.

The show, organized by Drew Heitzler, brings together work by more than 60 individual artists and artists’ collectives. Its title derives from Martha Rosler’s 35-year-old series of classic photo-collages from the Vietnam era, in which sociopolitical connections between cushy suburban comfort and brutal killing abroad were drawn in the starkest terms. Her “Bring the War Home” took a slogan hatched by the violent Weather Underground and applied it to the peaceful disruptions of art; a similar strategy operates here.

Many works assume a familiar protest mode, but just as many do not. In fact, in this context the simple (or complex) activity of making art emerges as a sociopolitical force in its own right. Neither the sleek, beautiful, tangled geometric interlace in Bart Exposito’s painting nor the cross between a hippie tie-dye and an explosive bomb blast in Michael Phelan’s “The Best Way Out Is Through” looks anything like a Jean Arp wall relief. But they do recall Arp’s World War I-era commitment to abstraction as a political refusal of powerful establishment values.

Alice Konitz splits the difference between domesticity and activist engagement with an elaborate homemade table built from fiber-board covered in gold Mylar, which serves as the pedestal for a unique, similarly handcrafted magazine. Think of this cheesy yet assertive motif as Design on a Dime art.

Adam McEwen likewise sends a disconcerting Conceptual message in hand-drawn, graphite typeface on paper painted with white acrylic. The declamatory note says, “1. Get out. 2. Leave the money. 3. Don’t call.” Is it a personal note from an ex-lover? Or a public message from Iraqi President Jalal Talabani?

A remarkable tableau by Justin Lowe closes the circle, turning the album cover of a legendary protest record into three dimensions. Neil Young’s 1974 “On the Beach” wrestled with the enigma of making art with integrity while the world devolves into chaos and greed. (The album title mixed surfer-stoner escapism with Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel of the same name, about the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war.) Lowe constructed a mannequin that resembles long-haired Young’s picture on the album cover, where he’s shown from behind dressed in a lemon yellow jacket and white pants.

Go around to the front, however, and the mannequin remains unchanged; Young is still seen from behind. There is no revelation of a hidden face, no front and back, just as a Minimalist sculptural box doesn’t separate inside from outside. Everything has collapsed into surface, and what you see is what you get.

You can contemplate the disturbing appropriateness of faceless anonymity as a portrait of world-famous celebrity while lying inside the flower-power tent Lowe also erected on his indoor beach.

The CD player was broken the day I went. But, hey: That’s the way things go.

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

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Gender and eroticism

Four tiny vintage photographs from the 1960s by famous “flaming creature” Jack Smith (1932-89) provide a frame of High Romantic erotic reference for a small group show at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery. A saint adorned with lilies and a dashing young man on a Baroque staircase inject an aroma of sexualized rapture that mingles neatly with aesthetic rupture.

Zackary Drucker adds elaborate, glossy, death-defying photographs in which an ancient drag queen passes on beauty secrets to a young protege. Photographic reproduction meshes with gender imitation in saturated color.

Candice Lin tells a brief, cautionary tale of being destroyed by your innocent dreams. Her eye-popping, Gumby-style animation shows a young girl brutally attacked by the unicorn residing in a poster on her bedroom wall.

Lisa Oppenheim re-creates the oldest known silent pornographic film, shot by shot, but without any people. Subtitles turn the leafy romp into a creepy, vaguely sinister narrative -- reminiscent of “Blow-Up” -- in which the desires and degradations of human nature are as timeless as the landscape.

The show’s lone note of dissonance is Mark Verabioff’s nonsense-poem, whose words were apparently picked out at random by throwing darts. The wall work bears no evident relationship to anything else in the exhibition, while its dull Dada strategy is even older than porn movies.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 837-1073, through Aug. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lizabetholiveria.com.

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Melancholic reflections

I counted 27 guns in Xavier Cazares Cortez’ exhibition of assemblage sculptures in the project room at Patricia Correia Gallery. There are gun pillows, silk-screened guns on plywood and guns slipcovered in leather and chamois.

The only element that turns up as often is the Spanish word “nada,” printed, stamped, cut out of board and represented in other assorted guises. The installation is titled “I Haven’t Seen Her in 108 Years” -- an enigmatic utterance that puts us back in 1898, the year of an earlier century’s big imperial adventure in foreign war. The show, with its bins of potions and medicines and racks of bumper stickers, is a restrained poetic riff on the existential tremors of being and nothingness, boxed and put up on shelves like scruffy memories of Joseph Cornell.

The most captivating piece is a pair of mirrors, their frames cracked and broken, their surfaces faintly etched with words printed backward. “It’s not what you think it is,” reads one, while the other declares, “You may not approve of the things he does.”

It’s a neat device. Reading the lines through your own reflection is like seeing thoughts projected before your eyes, while the ruined mirrors contribute to the installation’s larger aura of vainglorious melancholy.

Patricia Correia Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-1760, through July 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.correiagallery.com.