A magical, dangerous landscape

Gajin Fujita’s new paintings feature the same cast of characters as his old ones: fierce samurai, sexy geisha, fabulous animals and otherworldly spirits. The settings are also similar: the mean streets of an anonymous metropolis, where silhouetted palm trees, tropical foliage and shimmering moonlight provide the theatrical backdrop for dazzling explosions of spray-painted tags and single words dolled up like customized low-riders.

What’s new is the compositional complexity. Fujita fractures his figures and forms, then weaves them back together. His six mixed-media paintings at LA Louver Gallery (only his second solo show in Los Angeles) are visual dynamos.

In the past, Fujita built his paintings from the ground up. He first covered prepared wood panels with gold, silver and platinum leaf. Then he and his crew tagged, bombed and otherwise violated the naked expanses of precious metals.

Next, he painted backgrounds, inserted figures and used stencils to add pattern, detail and local color. He completed the works by superimposing super-size words, each letter of which was a landscape or abstract painting unto itself.

Creation and destruction went hand in hand. Everything Fujita added to a painting obliterated what was underneath it -- just like real graffiti. In his do-or-die dramatics, every element had to outdo the others or be swallowed up by them.

Fujita’s new paintings are far more sophisticated. Their elements do not compete against one another so much as complement one another’s strengths, creating a more subtle orchestration of emotions and experiences.

Fujita still begins with gold-, silver- and platinum-leafed panels. But rather than follow the step-by-step process of his earlier works, he jumps back and forth between steps, mixing elements more aggressively -- and pleasurably.

In the 6-by-8-foot “Slow & Easy,” graffiti sits atop stenciled patterns. In the 7-by-10-foot “Fatal Match,” figures disintegrate into Cubist-inspired riots of angled planes and fragmented patterns, their armored garments and flowered robes overlapping and entangling to form abstract shapes.

In the intimately scaled “Lust,” the limbs of lovers wind around each other like a writhing nest of snakes. “Burn” is a big window onto a night sky in which the heart-festooned plumage of a fantastic phoenix becomes a sumptuous garden of sensual delight and a pyrotechnic display of compositional virtuosity.

Five similarly large drawings, each collaged together from the hand-cut, homemade stencils Fujita uses to make his paintings, reveal one step of his low-tech, labor-intensive process. More important, they suggest that he has looked long and hard at the scraps on his studio floor and learned a lot from the ways they play positive and negative space off each other, turning 3-D bodies into ghostly silhouettes and atmospheric sprays of paint into abstract patterns with substance and punch.

The clashing planes and dizzying figure-ground reversals in Fujita’s paintings flesh out these visual shifts to capture the polyglot poetry of life in the big city. Signaling an increasing command of pictorial space, they give form to a magical world loaded with romance, danger and adventure -- and fueled by the renegade ingenuity of a dyed-in-the-wool do-it-yourselfer.

LA Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

Starkness with dreamy delicacy

Marcelino Goncalves’ eight new paintings at Cherry and Martin transform ordinary snapshots into hauntingly beautiful meditations on longing, love and loss. All are painted with suave confidence and breathless delicacy, like one-off watercolors so sensitively done that it is hard to believe they are oils on panel.

The artist crafts smooth surfaces with finely sanded layers of bright white under-painting before applying thin washes of radiant color and swiftly sketched pencil lines to re-create images he finds on the Internet or snaps with his camera. The light that suffuses Goncalves’ pictures of men, animals, landscapes and interiors is all his own -- an uncanny blend of Renoir’s warm and fuzzy atmospherics and David Hockney’s casual cool.

Even stranger -- and stronger -- is Goncalves’ palette, a rosy repertoire of delicate pastels bleached of sappiness and charged with bittersweet poignancy. Razor-sharp starkness and diaphanous fluidity are impressively woven together.

The largest painting, at 4 feet by 6 feet, shows 13 recruits kicking back in the hall of a boot camp dormitory. More than half look at the camera, and many halfheartedly raise their middle fingers, pretending to act tough but convincing no one, especially themselves. The other young men gaze at each other, trying to figure out what pose to strike as their portrait is snapped.

The expressions are heart-wrenching. If not for the rifle, military fatigues and wall placard identifying incendiary and smoke-screen grenades, the image could be of summer camp or the first week of boarding school. It presents a side of the war in Iraq not often seen -- innocence on the cusp of destruction.

Goncalves wrests similarly complex sentiments from a portrait of Pat Tillman, a soldier named Smithey and, strange as it may seem, from a pair of pigeons perched on a roof’s rafters. The loveliness of these paintings recalls Elizabeth Peyton’s desire-drenched pictures, but without the infatuation with glamour and celebrity. There’s something of Maureen Gallace’s subdued paintings of houses in Goncalves’ art too. It is maturing into a profoundly engaging body of work that is both idealized and individualized, dreamy and real.

Cherry and Martin, 12611 Venice Blvd., (323) 398-7404, through Dec. 16. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. www.cherryandmartin.com

Animal kingdom has little drama

In terms of materials, Laurie Hogin’s exhibition at Koplin Del Rio Gallery is all over the place. It includes three mannequins clad in costumes for imaginary films, dozens of cast resin mushrooms sprinkled with glitter and affixed to the walls and 56 oil paintings depicting animals whose feathers, hides and fur come in supersaturated colors not found in nature.

In terms of ideas, however, Hogin’s show is one-dimensional. It all strikes the same high-pitched note, as if shrieking, “The end is near. Modern culture is an aberration, utterly fake and irredeemably alienated from nature.”

The problem is not that Hogin is critical of industrial society’s abuse of the environment. It is that she fails to adequately address the complexity of such global issues in the genre at which she is most adept: super-realistic still-life painting.

Hogin’s technical facility and illusionistic virtuosity are amazing. Few contemporaries rival her capacity to transform oil paint on panel and canvas into such vivid realistic illusions of alligators, turtles, salamanders, monkeys, frogs and bunnies, among other exotic creatures a botanist might recognize if Hogin has not made them up.

The plumage, coats and skins of her creatures are even more fabulous. Their natural patterns are enhanced by the eye-popping colors of computer-generated cartoons, consumer packaging and the artificial coloring of soft drinks and foodstuffs.

But the compositions Hogin sets up and executes are static.

The small paintings of single birds have all the drama of field-guide illustrations. The medium-size ones have the presence of generic portraits, even though Hogin inserts consumer products to imply allegorical significance. (Heavy-handed titles such as “American Domestics: Red-Necked Red State Ring-Tail” don’t help.) And the large canvases resemble images of overcrowded dioramas in natural history museums, where the taxidermy animals pose in perfect profile because there’s no room to do anything else.

Hogin’s sculptures and costumes suggest that she feels similarly confined by her paintings. Her 3-D works, however, are not nearly as accomplished as her consummately crafted images. Breaking out of the still life format by allowing narrative, drama and more fantasy into her pictures might solve the problem better than leaving painting behind for sculptural objects, especially when they come off as props.

Koplin Del Rio Gallery, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-9055, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.koplindelrio.com

Tough love: Get a clue and get out

If you spend more time in art galleries than neighborhood bars, Dan Attoe’s neon sculptures at Peres Projects will probably remind you of similar works by Bruce Nauman, Karen Carson and even Joseph Kosuth. From this perspective, the glowing signs by the Portland-based 31-year-old are a bit derivative.

But if you are more comfortable hanging out at local watering holes than visiting art exhibitions, these handcrafted wall sculptures are more likely to remind you of similar ones breweries distribute to advertise their brands. From this perspective, Attoe’s pieces are hilarious.

In place of the bold graphics and idealized imagery international brands use to drive their messages into the heads of patrons, Attoe uses lettering that appears to be handwritten, images that look as if they fell out of his sketchbook and phrases that might have spilled from lips loosened by drink.

Most can’t be printed here, but the upshot, conveyed by leggy angels, dancing skeletons, eagles, a vampire tree, a gun-toting redhead and a figure that resembles Jesus, is down-home tough love: Quit feeling sorry for yourself; get a clue; get your act together; and, simply, get out.

That’s not all. Attoe’s art not only demonstrates that the social activities of frequenting galleries and taverns share more than snobs -- on either side -- admit. It also flies in the face of our divisive times, when too many issues are presented as if they have only two sides. Anyone who enjoys spending time in both galleries and bars knows that life is more complicated than that.

Peres Projects, 969 Chung King Road, (213) 617-1100, through Dec. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.peresprojects.com