Rattling the cage of pop culture, politics

At ACME, a lovable Frankenstein of a chair made by Martin Kersels from pieces of multiple chairs speaks of the artist’s massive frame, which often has been a source of humor in his art. It also signals his unconventional approaches to craft and design and his knack for playing both to provocative ends.

Although Kersels sat enthroned at the show’s opening -- a practical and clever way of holding court at his reception -- the throne is meant for anyone who cares or dares to sit. A grandiose grotesque, it also is homely and homey but not totally inviting. With its hodgepodge of styles and uneven arms, one of which seems like a mismatched transplant, the other a crudely hewn prosthetic, it leaves potential sitters unsure about fit, whether in size or taste.

Fit matters, as this is something of the bastard couch-potato cousin to Cinderella’s slipper or King Arthur’s sword in the stone. But what sort of royalty might this mutt of a throne make you? Illegitimate ruler? Uncertain coalition builder? Empire cobbler? Leader of a melting pot, red and blue states, the free world?

Kersels positioned this seat of power for optimum viewing of a quintet of ceiling-hung “charms” that double as lamps.

The illumination is dark. In fact, one lantern is a dark cloud made of black cloth wrapped over an armature and lighted from within by a red bulb. Two lamps, made of wrapped and woven wire, take the forms of the “Little Boy” A-bomb and Darth Vader’s Death Star. The two remaining lamps are improvised from a dangling lion costume -- with mismatched light bulbs standing in for the hanged animal’s eyes popping out of their sockets -- and an upside-down statue of a dog holding a basket of flowers in its teeth.

Kersels’ charm collection is a pop-culturally astute display of darkly humored good-luck knickknacks, but it also is an absurdly Shakespearean ensemble of apparitions. The throne room thus becomes a set in which one might imagine countless and timeless characters taunted and tempted by specters of might, alliance and fate. But in a world of WMD anxiety, unsure friends and saber-rattling in Iran, it’s hard not to think that the winces and chuckles this tragicomedy elicits arise from warped familiarity.

Kersels provides more seating in the form of a bench in a room of portraits. Imagine paintings of the genre of Caravaggio’s “The Lute Player,” and you get a sense of the references Kersels embeds in these color photographs. Impassioned and earnest musicians, lighted with such drama as to make a Baroque painter weep, emerge from darkness sporting their instruments.

These are evolved descendants of the noise-making gizmos Kersels installed in a 2000 exhibition for children at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In one photograph, a player gasps as she strokes a small, free-standing doorjamb that promises the sounds of not only the closing door but the attendant zips, clicks and jangles of a doorknob, deadbolt, slider and security chain. A young girl, seemingly transported from a Vermeer painting, pulls the string on a device that uses a pulley to raise and drop a tiny pile of junk.

Others master devices that rattle chains, amplify the hoof-beat-simulating potential of coconut shells, or issue whines from bellows. The instruments, which were exhibited with a similar set of photos last year in Paris, are absent here, but a recorded score Kersels conducted emanates from beneath the bench as you sit and imagine the action.

This visual and sonic comedy of clangs, clops and kerplunks is a lighter and oddly lovely counterpart to Kersels’ room of dark charms. But even here, amid sounds and images of security, rattling, forced air and the feigned approach of horses, it’s easy to pick up a political resonance.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.acmelosangeles.com

Surrealist shows she has the chops

Rene Magritte created a Surrealist icon when he painted a slab of ham with an eye staring out from its middle. Although none of her cuts stare back at you at Richard Telles Fine Art, Berlin-based painter Monika Baer, offering her first L.A. solo show, also takes meat to surreal ends.

In works on paper and paintings that incorporate a variety of media, Baer unleashes obviously fine technical training and a penchant for the visceral to create works that pit the literal against the illusionistic and fuse the surreal and romantic with the expressionistic. Although that might sound overly rich, Baer manages to make it all ethereal, distilling it to a kind of Minimalist, Color-field Magical Realism.

Baer’s collages reveal her skill in pumping it up and then paring it down. She works with photos of buffed cyclists, rendered all the more muscular by speed suits printed to look like flayed flesh, and with butcher advertisements flaunting close-ups of choice cuts. But she de-saturates all but the magenta in these pictures and lightens them down to a shimmer of white and pink, turning all that meat into but a whisper.

Salami and money, pictured in fine detail, fall from the sky in Baer’s paintings, but only in a few slices and a bill or two -- richly painted but sparse punctuation amid voids of color that assert the washy, cloudy presence of ink, oil paint and ash, and also masquerade as atmosphere. Material fades into haze, in both substance and subject matter.

Baer captivates with works that conflate the mundane with the uncanny, and the lush with the lean.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 965-5578, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.tellesfineart.com

Looking for paths of change, release

At Blum & Poe, Cologne-based Friedrich Kunath’s second Los Angeles show upholds the promise of his first, in 2004, with paintings that place representational imagery against abstract atmosphere. A preoccupation with trying to fix one’s position while also exploring the world carries over from his last show.

Canvases are flooded with boldly hued washes of color, leaving behind an ultra-saturated haze. Into this, the artist places simple black-and-white line-art graphics -- a ladder reaching into the center of the void and leaning against nothingness, or a giant man pushing a house deeper into space and perhaps out of the picture.

Kunath employs multiple media. A humorous, sad and romantic series of photos -- reminiscent of the work of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who used the camera as a way of recording performative journeys -- shows Kunath walking away from the camera on a cold day. Starting out bulked up in layers of clothing, he removes items in each frame, leaving a trail of castoffs in the frosted path until, underdressed, he disappears from view.

Meanwhile, a taxidermy bird -- a heron or perhaps an egret -- stands in the middle of the gallery looking backward, apparently comfortable wearing black wingtips but perplexed by the footprints he’s left behind. Kunath’s works speak of the difficulties and contradictions of being a citizen of the world and perhaps more specifically of being an artist -- perpetually trying to free yourself while treading a path and leaving behind a trail.

Blum & Poe, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through April 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.blumandpoe.com

Making something out of nothingness

The main event of London-based Anish Kapoor’s show at Regen Projects is an 8-by-33-foot free-standing wall of mirror-polished steel with contours matching its title: “S-Curve.” As you move around it, your reflection shrinks, stretches and flips amid the mercurial play of concave and convex surfaces that slip in and out of one another.

There’s a gee-whiz factor, but it gives way to a more thoughtful consideration of the possibility of an object that is so physically present and yet visible only by what and how it reflects.

The other mind-blower is an untitled work resembling the bell of a large horn, just under 4 feet across, painted black and set into a wall so you look only into the void. The tube grows smaller in diameter, curves around inside the wall and resurfaces as another orifice a few feet away -- a small black hole just over 4 inches across.

And it is a black hole; the reflections in the bell remind you how much light is going in, but so little comes out that you have to convince yourself that the smaller hole is not a spot painted on the wall. Look back into the bell, and you see reflections of yourself and appear to get sucked into the void.

Kapoor’s works engage with material to the point of indulgence, and yet they leave you contemplating nothingness in ways both joyful and anxious.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through April 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.regenprojects.com