Mullican, with no sunny disposition

Hot on the heels of a fantastic survey of works by Lee Mullican (1919-98) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Selwyn Fine Art has organized a similarly stunning show of paintings Mullican made in the 1960s. The 10 oils on canvas from 1963 to 1968 blaze with the same luminous intensity as Mullican’s more famous works from the 1940s and ‘50s, which feature a dazzling palette of radiant golds, luxurious ochers, sumptuous yellows and shimmering whites.

Subtitled “An Abundant Harvest of Sun,” the museum retrospective drew 35 of its 46 paintings from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Sunny abundance is nowhere to be found in Mullican’s paintings from the 1960s. Rather than embodying the golden light of cosmic transcendence or the contemplative stillness of blissful hippie serenity, his ‘60s pictures are more down to earth, conflicted and gritty -- not to mention socially charged, disquieting and timely.

The sequence of paintings in the dimly lighted gallery recalls Dante’s imaginative descent in “The Inferno.” In the entryway, “The Lights, the Celestial Paths” bids adieu to the heavens. The nearly 4-by-8-foot canvas is an abstract rendition of the night sky, one that pays equal homage to Monet’s water lilies and Klimt’s gorgeously patterned fabrics. Its watery blues and illusionistic deep space occur nowhere else in the show.

In the main gallery, the palette is primarily defined by fiery oranges, scalding reds, smoldering browns and smoky blacks. Even Mullican’s supersaturated blues seem to be the centers of flames. Apocalyptic conflagrations or the hellish light of nighttime fire-bombings are evoked by his abstract compositions, in which every square inch simultaneously seems to be exploding and melting down.

From left to right, brightness gives way to darkness. “Shattered Passage” is bright but hardly optimistic. Its fragmented forms and jagged contours resemble a road map to nowhere, the street plan of a city that has lost its way. The next five paintings depict the details of life in such a civilization.

The largest, at nearly 7 by 10 feet, looks like a cross between Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and a Navajo blanket. Asymmetrical zigzags cut through a pulsating field of concentric circles to create a type of cacophony that Mullican somehow manages to control -- but not without conveying the possibility of absolute incoherence. Strange shapes snake through the masterfully calibrated mess like devilish serpents or broken strands of DNA.

Inchoate icons emerge from the furiously worked surfaces of other works. Some resemble Day of the Dead skulls. Others recall ancient fertility figures, leering monkeys and the smiley face symbol. These schematic shapes are the forebears of similar images in works by Keith Haring, A.R. Penck, Lari Pittman and Michael Reafsnyder, contemporary painters who, like Mullican, give visual form to the primitive side of modern life.

Although Mullican’s paintings from the ‘60s are less resolved, harmonious and resplendent than his works from the ‘40s and ‘50s, they are also more poignant, especially in their willingness to grapple with darkness, failure and chaos. This makes them timely, perhaps even more a part of the 21st century than the 20th.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, (323) 933-9911, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Something gained in the translation

As a culture, we are far more familiar with things getting lost in translation than discovered there. We accept that nuance and meaning fall between the cracks when translated from one language (or system) to another.

As an artist who makes paintings, sculptures, drawings, videos and audio installations, Steve Roden begins with the opposite assumption: that translation is a wellspring of creativity. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, his scrappy new works delight in the wacky adaptations that take place when symbols and significance do not precisely align, causing folks to fill in the gaps on the fly -- fudging, fiddling and finessing our way to communication.

Roden’s new works are based on his recollections of grammar school music lessons (“Every Good Boy Does Fine”), which he uses to translate a classic score into colors, shapes and maneuvers. The loopy logic of his idiosyncratic system disappears in these paintings and sculptures (plus one silent video), all of which take on lives of their own.

Each painting looks like four or five geometric abstractions piled atop one another. Flat planes of dirty, tertiary tints are crisscrossed with candy-colored lines running every which way. Messy coats of oozing paint fail to cover previous applications, leaving multiple layers of ghostly traces that seem to inhabit different universes. Patterns emerge from cacophonous nonsense only to be swallowed in whirlpools of dissonance.

In many works, Roden makes a pretzel of perspective, providing top, front and side views of diagrammatic landscapes. He’s like a latter-day Cubist hired to map fantastic cities or to illustrate the instructions for impossible-to-assemble appliances.

Alfred Jensen’s insanely inclusive paintings lie behind Roden’s funky compositions, as do Chuck Close’s gridded pictures. Imagine Franz Ackerman with more discipline or James Siena with less and you’ll have an idea of the kaleidoscopic punch packed into Roden’s paintings.

In our obsessively professional age, there’s no shame in falling between the cracks. That’s where art thrives, alongside other creative translations.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through April 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Making a big deal of a minor work

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a place for his voracious brand of Pop art by erasing a drawing given to him by Willem de Kooning, one of the only Abstract Expressionists who was not appalled by pop culture.

Art historians love to tell the story of the “Erased de Kooning Drawing” because it encapsulates the contentious relationship between artistic generations and the shift from the hot emotions of gestural expressionism to the cool of Minimalism and the deadpan of Pop.

As a work of art, however, Rauschenberg’s time-delayed collaboration with De Kooning is not all that captivating. It’s more interesting to read about than to look at. Nevertheless, Christopher Wool treats it as a touchstone. At Gagosian Gallery, the New York painter displays eight huge, black-and-white paintings that pompously reenact Rauschenberg’s minor work.

Using a can of black paint, Wool sprays curvy lines on white linen, then uses solvent-soaked towels to erase his gestures. Sometimes he rubs them out, leaving only gray washes. Sometimes his efforts are halfhearted, leaving faded traces of lines. And sometimes Wool leaves the lines alone. The results are designer versions of walls that have been graffitied and painted over, again and again.

Seven other similarly grandiose works are silk-screened renditions of Wool’s artfully blurred spray paintings or silk-screened enlargements of paint spills. They come in tasteful shades of reddish brown and dull pink. The point is that gestural marks and reproduced gestural marks are similar and different.

Both series represent insider art at its worst. They are emblems of the desire to fit into history without rocking the boat. Even among academics, only the most sheltered can pretend that the bad-boy antics Wool evokes with his stylish graffiti have anything to do with life in the street.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through April 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Painting mere moments in time

The titles of Judie Bamber’s eight new oils on canvas at Angles Gallery describe single moments: “August 15, 2002, 11:15 a.m.,” “June 9, 2003, 6:15 a.m.” and “January 1, 1999, 7:15 a.m.”

Such designations are common to photographs, which sometimes seem to capture brief slices of time. Painters generally spend too many hours on each piece to foster such illusions. So there is something perverse about making paintings of fleeting instants.

Yet that’s what Bamber does in her lovely seascapes. Each compresses long hours spent staring at the horizon into delicious instances that invite contemplation and evoke memories painful and precious.

On first glance, Bamber’s palette seems simple: two or more bands of saccharine-sweet pastels, warm grays, foggy whites and mellow tans. But subtle variations slowly swim to the surface, inflecting the horizontal bands with enough visual energy to keep your eyes on the lookout for more and your mind alert to the peculiarities of perception. Pretty quickly, your first experience of each painting becomes a memory against which you play your relationship to it.

Past and present swirl around each other more vividly in two works on paper that depict Bamber’s mom. Based on snapshots Bamber’s dad made of his wife before Bamber was born, the small drawing and watercolor combine intimacy and distance to make viewers feel like voyeurs and participants. Rather than pushing us out of the picture, Bamber uses layers of artifice to draw us into ongoing dramas.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through April 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.