Daring to tread on the turf of a master

For a young artist to invoke the legacy of Michelangelo requires enormous confidence and considerable skill, plus a good dose of daredevil insanity. Matt Johnson brings all those qualities to bear on his recent work.

Johnson is the sculptor who made “Breadface,” the oddly compelling, almost primitive little mask that became a virtual logo for “Thing,” the celebrated survey of recent L.A. sculpture at the UCLA Hammer Museum last year. “Breadface” was cast in plastic and meticulously painted to re-create the heel of a commercially baked loaf of bread, with crude eyes and a gaping mouth torn out of it. The sculpture, conjuring thoughts of a kid playing with his food, is a talisman for fundamental ideas about creativity.

So are most of the works in Johnson’s quietly sensational, funny yet soulful solo debut at Blum & Poe Gallery. The invocation of Michelangelo, the Renaissance sculptor who established so many prevailing modern ideas about art, is startling.

Johnson’s “Pieta” of course derives from the Vatican marble figure of a dead Christ draped across the lap of his mother, portrayed as an exquisite, impossibly young woman. (She looks far more youthful than her bearded son.) The masterpiece was carved when Michelangelo himself was impossibly young -- all of 24. Johnson recalls these details by recasting the sculpture’s traditional marble into automobile mufflers, exhaust pipes and wheel rims. They’re appropriate for both the obsessions of a modern youth and the earliest mode of mature American avant-garde sculpture -- welded steel, in the industrial manner of artist David Smith.

Any pieta is a lamentation, and Johnson’s records the passing of the Industrial Age. But the subject also represents the death of the flesh and material existence, which is essential to the creation of another, more spiritually inclined reality. If Johnson’s kooky “Pieta” obliquely recalls the kind of souvenir art common to seaside tourist galleries, or the tinkering of an amateur art enthusiast, that’s just part of its quirky charm.

Michelangelo’s picture of creation -- the invisible spark between the outstretched forefingers of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling -- is the image repeated hundreds of times in Johnson’s “Magic Eye.” Like “Pieta,” it embraces vernacular culture as a potentially powerful artistic tool.

Magic eye is the generic name for an auto-stereogram -- a 1979 perceptual invention in which a single-image pattern tricks the brain into thinking that a two-dimensional picture is actually a three-dimensional object. (You can find auto-stereogram posters in souvenir shops along Hollywood Boulevard and the Venice boardwalk.) That Johnson, a sculptor, would feature a large painting in his solo debut might be unexpected, until you think of the work as “virtual sculpture.”

The serpentine pattern of interlocking image fragments in “Magic Eye” is reminiscent of the 1913 painting “Flight of the Swifts” by Giacomo Balla, the only Italian Futurist artist who worked in Michelangelo’s Rome rather than Leonardo’s Milan. Johnson has a marvelous capacity for mixing relevant historical sources from traditionally separated realms of high and low culture. (Another sculpture, “Ventifact,” alludes to the natural erosion of stone while referring to Picasso, Warhol and the sugar skulls of Day of the Dead celebrations.) Balla’s painting attempted to reconfigure dynamic motion and the flux of nature in a modern way. “Magic Eye” likewise looks to the heavens, witnessing the contemporary dynamism of artistic creation.

Perhaps the show’s most powerful, even haunting work is “4eva,” a massive granite boulder dating from the Precambrian era before animals walked the Earth. Exquisitely veined and multicolored, the waist-high chunk of stone is disconcerting: Has it even been carved? Or is it a Duchampian ready-made?

It takes scrutiny to discover an almost imperceptible group of lines that scratch out the name “Eva,” like some vague inference of prehistoric graffiti. Since the Precambrian boulder predates mammalian life, did a supernatural finger write it?

Michelangelo asserted that his sculptural figures were already locked inside the stone block, and he just chipped away the excess to set the art free. Is that what the eroding waters and winds of time, nature, history and art have done here?

“4eva” is a mash note and a pun for “forever,” suggesting both the age of the stone and an expression of love and eternal devotion. Meanwhile the name makes a nice feminine partner for Adam in Johnson’s nearby painting, “Magic Eye.” With religiosity in the forefront of current events, Johnson’s savvy ruminations on art and creation are a pleasure to behold.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

www.blumandpoe.com

Falling short of a Great Society

With a recitation of Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous 1964 speech challenging Americans to create the Great Society echoing in the background, viewers are invited to peruse Rodney McMillian’s big, liquid painting of a sky filled with fluffy clouds and made from poured acrylic. To see it one must step around 18 low-slung, rectangular, Minimalist-style cardboard boxes, strewn about the floor like so many cheap homemade coffins. On two side walls, inexpensive wall hangings showing Jesus at Gesthemane sanctify the room, while twisting the common assumption of what a prayer rug might be.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, McMillian has made a devastatingly acute installation that poignantly considers failed hopes, persistent dreams and art’s great place in the conundrum of capitalist society. The sky painting is for sale in pieces, with the cost of each square foot calculated according to a buyer’s income level.

“For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history ... to lead America toward a new age,” Johnson’s speech declared. “You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.” The ringing words of inspiration, as true today as they were four decades ago, dissolve into tragedy beneath McMillian’s bright blue sky.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

www.vielmetter.com

Thinking big pays off for painter

With Andy Moses’ new abstract paintings, bigger is better. His show at Patricia Faure Gallery, the artist’s second and best solo at the gallery, includes several canvases that are more than 5 feet high and 11 feet wide. The surface of each is concave, bowing in gently toward the center, which results in a painting that recalls a 1950s Cinerama screen.

The palette is dominated by cobalt blue. The intense acrylic color is traversed by horizontal vapor trails of white and, here and there, cream, red and other hues. Each line starts off crisp and defined, but it loosens and fuzzes as it reaches the other side. The paintings are resolutely abstract, but they recall the perceptual warp of aerial flight and a television screen that’s gone on the fritz.

Moses’ smaller canvases suffer by comparison, because they condense the visual sweep in the way a snapshot does. (Suddenly they become little landscapes.) But the big pictures fuse languorous contemplative bliss with a heightened, sexy glamour. Think of it as Tantric abstraction.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

www.patriciafauregallery.com

After Katrina swept through

“In Katrina’s Wake,” the lovely suite of color photographs (and a book) by Seattle artist Chris Jordan at Paul Kopeikin Gallery does something that’s at first disconcerting. Frontal, flat and formal, in a documentary mode first associated with black-and-white photographers like Minor White and Aaron Siskind in the 1940s, the photos bring a level of elegant beauty to a horrific episode more keenly associated with grimness, terror and death.

Where White and especially Siskind referred to abstract painting, Jordan’s photographs are also attuned with other art forms -- particularly sculpture and installation art. A stack of battered mattresses is Minimalist, a strewn pile of colored jars recalls “scatter” art. People don’t appear, except as a memory -- the now-absent former users of the ruined objects Jordan has recorded.

What makes the photographs compelling is their visual assertion of a careful, observant formal intelligence in the wake of all that devastation. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster both natural and man-made, and Jordan’s photographs make clear that it didn’t have to be that way.

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-0765, through Oct. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

www.paulkopeikingallery.com

christopher.knight@latimes .com