Words fail, but the art succeeds

The reward of the poetic lies in how it coaxes us to coax something from it -- to work through and find meaning in its slipperiness. The risk of the poetic, if one sees it as risk, is that an audience might not get all that an author is trying to get at.

In his first solo exhibition at Solway Jones, Carmine Iannaccone continues his exploration of the poetic potential of landscape art. The problem here is that Iannaccone isn’t sure whether he wants to deal in poetry or prose.

Presented with this show of intriguing exercises in geometry, engineering, balance, repetition, variation on theme and sculptural representation of landscape is a statement filling us in on the artist’s preoccupation with the relationship between landscape and the politics of nationalism and empire -- specifically, American nationalism and empire.

The problem is that his legal-size sheet of small type presumes to raise ideas that are more profoundly raised by the works themselves. The good news is that you don’t get to the statement until you reach the gallery’s back room and already have spent time with the three impressive works the statement sells short.

Iannaccone’s landscapes are constructed from pine planks laminated and then carved into crags, or they are layered up out of contour-cut sheets of medium-density fiberboard. Their basic physical attributes -- built and then refined, or built to design and in some instances given a nice coat of color -- become metaphors for the landscape around us. And that’s just the start.

“Mighty / Mighty” is a wall-hung exercise in clumsy, craggy yin / yang. Two identical forms, each combining a likeness of a mountain with an underlying geometric structure, are presented together. One is flipped over, placing the structure on top and creating a flow between the constructed and natural, the rational and romantic.

“Nation Building” is a collection of three similar rough-hewn sculptures of the same rocky mountain -- a brutish reminder of how the landscape, while remaining constant, is also something we perpetually remake and reenvision.

The showstopper is “The Glories of Erosion,” a narrow and gently sloping 8-foot-long mock-up of a time-worn plane with all but nothing beneath it. Flat on the underside, as if made to sit on a pedestal or the floor, the landscape rests at near eye-level atop a tiny wall that is in essence a fulcrum. One end of this landscape-turned-seesaw plank touches the adjacent gallery wall, where a cleat catches its edge, preventing it from teetering and collapsing and forcing an extreme cantilever. As an object that all but defies gravity by exploiting it, and as a representation of land without grounding, it is as dynamic as it is precarious.

Held in balance, hovering, inverted, made in multiple, dependent and giving impetus to their own construction, Iannaccone’s formally deft and dazzling landscapes evoke far more than his writing. Thankfully, these sculptural poetics surpass the limits of their maker’s exposition.

Solway Jones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 937-7354, through July 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.solwayjonesgallery.com

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Zombies get caught in the act

The back story of Chad Robertson drawing inspiration from zombie films for paintings in his second show at sixspace only confirms the strengths and weaknesses in these works, some of which harness and expand on the inspiration while others succumb to it.

Robertson’s past work started with videotaped interviews from which he plucked frames revealing the subjects’ emotion through facial expression. He placed those expressions on figures, creating artificially jumbled and jittery faces that are grab bags of real emotions.

This time around, in attempting to capture something else real -- our capacity to behave like zombies -- the artist relied on pictures of people acting like, well, zombies. The problem is that the work is only as good as the source material.

The least of the paintings seem like quickly daubed promo art for an “American Idol” spinoff tracking horror-movie auditions, with fashionable youth unable to suppress the impulse to look hot but incapable of more than the sorts of poses that elicit snickers.

The strongest of Robertson’s paintings, particularly his group compositions, benefit from more narrative implication and a more studied and exploited consideration of bodies moving against gravity and inertia. You can see the trudge and slump and writhe in these figures, who still remind you of zombie flicks but also of why those flicks remind us of ourselves.

sixspace, 5803 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 932-6200, through June 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sixspace.com

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Saying it in words and in pictures

Writing begets art at Marc Foxx, where Frances Stark, known for text-embedded art, presents some of her most compelling and accessible work. Oddly, although the text is minimal and largely obscured, these are among her most literary works as well.

Built around the title “Structures That Fit My Opening,” this personal but far from self-indulgent exhibition is a collection of drawn, painted and collaged visual meditations on making and letting things fall into place at the intersection of a creative life and an everyday life.

A silk shirt sleeve collaged onto a panel doubles as a snail emerging from its shell. Writings, set aside during the making of art and the living of domestic life, peek out of a handbag in a work of cut-and-pasted paper depicting the entryway of a house.

The loveliest thought and most dynamic composition come together in “Push,” a simple image collaged of common materials and depicting the glass storefront of the artist’s studio. A colorful stream of sliced and diced mail -- announcements from shows by Stark’s artist friends and colleagues -- is seen as it cuts horizontally across the composition and passes from outside the window, through the mail slot in the door and into the studio. Any artist -- anyone with a life, for that matter -- knows of the pull between the time and space of the self and that of the community on which this work muses.

With her powerful use of images to tell, Stark, whose work has long leaned on her smarts with written language, is starting to look like a genuine double threat.

Marc Foxx, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (323) 857-5571, through June 24. Closed Sundays, Mondays. www.marcfoxx.com

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The everyday as extraordinary

In a satellite space just down the street from Marc Selwyn’s main gallery, German-born, Belgium-based artist Kati Heck’s first solo show in Los Angeles is a dark but playful contemporary cabaret.

Promiscuous in style and imagery, Heck’s large oils on canvas are records of the artist’s spinning of the everyday into an enigmatic mythology. In a world of landscapes variously threatened, story-bookish or romantic, an aging, halfhearted and gym shorts-clad classical figure -- part Zeus, part God, part Laocoon -- and a fur-frocked goddess hold aloft a fire hose with a bulge like a rat in a snake’s belly.

A bloated centaur -- whose massive torso dwarfs the horse onto which it is grafted -- is an echo of European equestrian portraits in which artists inflated the presence of heroes by shrinking their steeds. Here the centaur engages in swordplay with skewers in a fondue pot. Amazonian fairy-princess pinup girls strike poses and bond by braiding together their pubic hair on a bluff overlooking pastoral hills and a power plant. And hippie titans and barbarians wield weapons and gear apparently gleaned from the shelves of the five-and-dime.

These elaborately composed theater pieces are intertwined with more banal views of the theater of the street -- simple portraits and social scenes -- as well as surreal and childish doodles and fragments of pornography. These random bits are more modest in scale and mostly on paper.

Densely hung in small rooms, the work pulls the past and present into each other, as it does the common and the utterly bizarre. In spewing out this mix of elegant and clumsy visual babble, one wonders if Heck hasn’t perfectly articulated some sense of the times. The painter of modern life has taken over the asylum.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art at DOMESTIC, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-9911, Through July 8. Closed Sundays, Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com