Making these seemingly opposites attractive

Christoph Ruckhaberle is a master of let’s-pretend primitivism. At Kantor / Feuer Gallery, the Leipzig-based artist’s big linocuts and bigger paintings combine the bold graphic punch of Expressionist printmaking with the goofy foolishness of playing dress-up. It’s a felicitous mix, making for an L.A. solo debut that neither takes itself too seriously nor gets bogged down in the stubborn dumbness of much art that seeks an antidote to the hollowness of modern life in the supposedly brute simplicity of primitivism.

On first glance, Ruckhaberle’s images resemble paintings made by children, folk artists or outsiders. Colors are bold and basic, mostly those found in an eight-pack of crayons. Shapes are flat, supersaturated and solid. Figures are distorted, their torsos awkwardly distended, heads out of proportion and limbs impossibly bent to fit into the frame or to lie flat on the picture-plane. When decorative patterns appear, they’re garish and clashing.

A second look distinguishes Ruckhaberle’s works from run-of-the-mill, recycled Neo-Expressionism. Many of his vivid, sharply contoured pictures -- some 9 feet by 6 feet or larger -- echo the compositions and subjects favored by such modern masters as Picasso, Degas, Matisse and Picabia, as well as his countryman, Max Beckman. The seeming naivete of Ruckhaberle’s images gradually gives way to formal rigor and pictorial sophistication, delivered with confident aplomb and great economy of means.

Imagine a child copying a painting by Picasso, who was himself trying to paint like a child. Now add a contemporary artist trying to paint like the child trying to paint like Picasso trying to paint like the child. That’s Ruckhaberle, for whom complexity and simplicity are two sides of the same coin.

Rather than rejecting the refinement of developed artistry to get back to the flesh-and-blood basics of authentic emotions and their bare-naked expression, Ruckhaberle sets up a sort of house of mirrors of crisscrossing sources and shifting references.

A suite of 24 linocuts presents 24 portraits of often hilarious masks. Some recall masks used in Kabuki theater, in Pacific Northwest ceremonies and by hockey goalies or motocross racers. Others evoke statutes from the South Pacific, masks from Africa and costumes from Day of the Dead celebrations, as well as circuses, masquerade balls and Halloween parties. In Ruckhaberle’s art, the primitive and the cosmopolitan go hand in glove.

Kantor / Feuer Gallery, 7025 Melrose Ave., (323) 933-6976, through Nov. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kantorfeuer.com

Leaving artist and subject behind

Jeremy Blake’s “Sodium Fox” is a polyglot melange of photographs, drawings, film clips and computer-generated effects all transferred to DVD. At Honor Fraser Inc., the looped, 14-minute film appears on flat-screen TV. It’s accompanied by a lilting instrumental and the raspy voice of Nashville poet and musician David Berman, reciting snippets of poetry in a manner that recalls a kinder and gentler Charles Bukowski or Tom Waits tooling around in the studio. Four digital prints round out the show.

Blake describes his dreamy narrative as a Pop portrait. He’s a big fan of Berman and his band, the Silver Jews, and “Sodium Fox” is a half-hearted, long-distance collaboration that offers more insights into Blake’s fascination with Berman than into Berman himself.

The history of portraiture is filled with works that reveal more about the painter than the sitter, so this aspect of Blake’s entertaining film is traditional. What distinguishes it from straightforward portraits is how casually it leaves Blake and Berman behind, catching viewers in the easygoing, stream-of-conscious drift of a contemporary Everyman -- a world-weary wanderer whose earnest search for meaning is melodramatic and endearing.

The pace of “Sodium Fox” is neither hurried nor indulgent. It lopes from scene to scene, thought to thought, memory to fantasy with deft delicacy. Its animated images are packed with details both incidental and essential. Repeat viewing is a pleasure. Blake probably spent countless hours editing and finessing, but all that labor disappears in the loose narrative’s light touch, seductive colors and love of daydreaming -- even at night, when the impressionistic story unfolds.

The look of Blake’s film may recall classic MTV, but its structure is based on James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” in which an ordinary guy’s everyday ramblings are also suffused with hope and regret, little pleasures and the possibility of big insights. “Sodium Fox” also evokes Ed Ruscha’s trademark painting, “Twentieth Century Fox,” Pat O’Neill’s multilayered films and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” It’s a rich mix that steers clear of pretentiousness.

Honor Fraser Inc., 1337 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 433-8474, through Nov. 4. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.honorfraser.com

Sculpting some goofball humor

Jeremy Mora’s L.A. solo debut consists of 56 tiny landscape sculptures mounted on the wall or set on pedestals. Each mini-diorama at Richard Heller Gallery is a world waiting to be explored.

Many are not bigger than a matchbox. All are fun to visit. Some are more than that. The best ones suggest human vulnerability, the vastness of the planet and the relative puniness of individuals.

In the 19th century, such sentiments were half of what was required for an experience of the sublime. The other half was soul-shuddering beauty and spine-tingling expansiveness.

Mora is far too humble a sculptor for the high side of the sublime, which he respectfully leaves to the imagination. Instead, he concentrates on the downside of the sublime, often softening its terrifying effect with dopey humor.

When silliness predominates, his pieces come off as sight gags -- clever illustrations of clever turns of phrase, or 3-D cartoons that do not need captions because their jokes are so simple.

The most memorable ones are the least illustrative. In them, Mora abandons the super-realistic illusionism of model train builders in favor of a mongrel aesthetic that mixes and matches scales and subjects, identifiable things that don’t belong in carefully crafted landscapes and unidentifiable lumps of stuff that remain intransigently abstract, despite seeming as if they have been swept off the floor of a busy tinkerer’s workshop.

The futility of human endeavor comes to mind before Mora’s most moving works, as does a deep appreciation for our incapacity to stop trying, no matter how long the odds are. Life’s tragicomic absurdity takes touching shape in his space-saving sculptures.

Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.richardhellergallery.com

Expressing themselves

At 1301PE, 100 small pencil drawings depict mass demonstrations. No captions appear, but banners, placards and posters in the images reveal that they picture protests all over the world. To peruse the salon-style installation is to feel, for a moment, as if it’s 1968 again, and that the world is bursting at its seams.

If you read the newspaper you know that’s not the whole story. And if you read the press release on the gallery desk, you learn that Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition is actually quite cynical, more concerned with symbolic rebellion than the real thing.

Dozens of his unidentified former students, most of whom live in Thailand, were commissioned to copy newspaper images of protests. (Tiravanija splits his time between Bangkok and New York.) As drawings, the handsomely framed works are utterly pedestrian, good enough to convey the basics but lacking the nuance that rewards sustained scrutiny -- or makes a second glance necessary.

As Conceptual art, Tiravanija’s project is ineffective. It merely goes through the motions of creating a collaborative team or community of artist-citizens. No one would look twice at these drawings if they did not come with Tiravanija’s imprimatur. Despite protests to the contrary, he’s still the star of the show, which transforms the gallery into a boutique outlet for the ill-gotten products of something like a designer sweatshop.

1301PE, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 938-5822, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.1301pe.com