Leaps: sober to sarcastic

The late French Conceptual artist Yves Klein made a now-infamous photograph that shows him doing an elegant swan dive from a second-story ledge into a damp Parisian street, as a thoroughly oblivious bicyclist rides by. Klein’s 1960 “Leap Into the Void” didn’t actually happen (the black-and-white photograph was manipulated). But its juxtaposition of aesthetic grace with mundane reality, separated only by the dangerous void between heaven and earth, is a classic image of the modern artistic dilemma.

Ciprian Muresan was not alive when Klein made the picture (he was born in 1977), but two years ago the Romanian artist made his own version of it. It shines in his slender but compelling American solo debut at Kontainer Gallery.

Muresan’s photograph purports to show what Klein’s camera would have recorded had the picture been taken just three seconds later: The artist lies sprawled on the hard pavement, while the anonymous bicyclist, still oblivious, has merely traveled a bit farther down life’s bumpy road.

Given our new, globally altered millennium, Muresan’s pothole-marked street lies in Eastern Europe rather than the leafy vicinity of romantic Paris. The architecture is dreary, and the sky is crisscrossed with unsightly electrical wires and studded with telephone poles. Tidy but drab, it’s an “anywhere” place for the “everyman” passing on his bicycle -- appropriate for a region that has been inhabited since prehistory and that this year metamorphosed for the umpteenth time by joining the European Union.

Mundane experience grinds on. Meanwhile, distinctive artistic fancies might be pitiless and even futile, but the urge to make them persists.

Muresan’s marvelous photograph is not just a tricky sight gag. (Has no one else ever done a riff on Klein’s celebrated photograph?) The artist reanimates a Conceptual art legacy for today’s specific set of social and cultural circumstances. At once witty and melancholic, clear-eyed and determined, his photograph dispenses with Klein’s secretive darkroom magic. In the process it performs the venerable artistic ritual of simultaneous homage and patricide.

Maybe it’s the Transylvanian in him. Muresan is also showing a suite of 12 drawings, which depicts one man ritualistically washing the body of another -- an apparent corpse. First he wipes the brow, then the chest. Each arm is raised, and next the torso is rolled on its side. So it continues, ending with the dead man’s feet.

The small drawings, done in concise, feathery marks, focus on the figures without much distraction of composing a particular setting, except for the space of art. Discernible humanity is conveyed, along with bodily weight.

To record the ritualized scene in simple pencil is also to engender humility and intimacy. Drawing emphasizes touch on a surface, which is what washing a body likewise entails. Life and death resonate.

Apparently, the corpse depicted in the suite is also Muresan’s self-portrait, while the figure doing the washing is an art dealer. Suddenly the spiritual solemnity is shattered by profane wit. An agent of commerce cleans up on the temporal flesh of the artist.

Muresan has a terrific knack for mixing seriousness with humor, sobriety with sarcasm. Like an exquisite pastry, layers of meaning unfold from otherwise mundane stuff.

The show also includes a wide-screen video animation that derives from Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic late-1960s story of a 15th century Russian icon painter, Andrei Rublyov, which the Soviet Union banned. Muresan turns typical animation traits against themselves. Scenes are lengthy and movement is slow, not jumpy and rapid, and everything is rendered in flat, exquisite shades of black and white rather than brilliant color.

Hypnotizing and strange, like some alien pageant, the video follows no rigorous narrative. A riderless horse rolls in the grass. A desolate landscape appears. A crucifixion plays out on a snowy hill. An earthly “escape” by what appears to be a balloon drifting over a Romanesque building takes place. I haven’t seen the Tarkovsky movie, which is said to focus on asserting an artist’s responsibility to participate in history. (Some stylistic descriptions of it do relate to the video’s look.) But the gorgeous animation stands on its own as a dreamy visual tone poem, which evokes time relentlessly slipping away. Muresan’s American debut is modest in size and extravagant in scope.

Kontainer Gallery, 944 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 621-2786, through May 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .kontainergallery.com.

When mere gray is more than gray

For his second show at Daniel Hug Gallery, Gaylen Gerber shows eight paintings from the last three years. Each one is a monochrome gray. They remind me of Robert Ryman’s -- although the similarity is structural, not stylistic or visual.

Ryman began with a simple premise -- a painting is pigment on a flat surface affixed to the wall -- and extrapolated it in myriad inventive, surprising and unusually satisfying ways for the next 40 years. Chicago-based Gerber is doing something similar: He begins with the idea that no painting stands on its own, existing instead in a complex perceptual matrix, and he spins it in variable ways.

Since no painting is an island, Gerber makes his work in tandem with other artists. He gave gray monochromes of various sizes to Heimo Zobernig, Tyson Reeder and B. Wurtz. Zobernig made abstract alterations to the surfaces, emphasizing the canvas as a physical object. Reeder added whimsical surfer imagery, asserting Gerber’s work as a material support.

Wurtz attached colorful kitchen pot-scrubbers along the top edge and dangled another on monofilament from the bottom. Gerber’s austere gray square assumes an uncanny metallic sheen, like a favorite cooking pot, simply through the inescapable force of eccentric juxtaposition.

In an apparent first, Gerber has also solicited assistance from an artist unaware of the cooperative effort. (Gerber dislikes the term “collaboration,” since each artist works independently.) He painted over a tall rectangle of thin wallboard, screened with Daniel Buren’s signature wide stripes and affixed with screws to the gallery wall, in his own logo-centric gray monochrome.

You wouldn’t know the stripes are there without scrutinizing the bland surface and noticing subtle shifts in reflected light. Gerber absorbs Buren’s art as a support for his own, and the effect is uncommonly agreeable.

Daniel Hug Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 221-0016, through Saturday. www.danielhug.com.

Abstraction to reality and back

A compact two-person show at Cherry and Martin packs considerable punch. The luxurious paintings of Southern California-based Daniel Dove and New York-based Tom McGrath balance abstraction and representation to such a refined (if exuberant) degree that one leads seamlessly into the other and back again.

A fragment of a Citgo gasoline sign at the center of Dove’s “Eye of Providence” spins out into a whorl of mottled red pigment. In turn, these abstract sweeps of color change into a fat interlace, which suggests the infernal interior of an oil refinery as imagined by Piranesi. The Citgo sign becomes a sinister crimson talisman deep within the monstrous core of a powerful, vaguely barbarous civilization.

McGrath’s splatters, speckles, sweeps and spots of richly colored oil paint vacillate between random and organized. With an acute color sense, “Night Grid” and “Dusk Grid” suggest aerial views of suburban sprawl, where the flickering lights of the street grid keep dissolving into atmospheric tracks of pigment across canvas.

Dove and McGrath are channeling such artists as Gerhard Richter and Edward Ruscha, whose paintings often evoke the elusiveness of thought as a product of material substance. One of many satisfactions in their work is that it aims so high. Both are painters to watch.

Cherry and Martin, 12611 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 398-7404, through May 12. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.cherryandmartin.com.

A taste for fashion; a sense of discord

If a fetish is an object imbued with magical power, Matt Greene’s fashion-conscious paintings tilt definitively toward fetishism. Whether it’s art or fashion that is the ultimate source of society’s mystic might is an unanswerable riddle his work seems determined to profess.

In Peres Project’s two gallery spaces, Greene’s five large-scale paintings and three drawings feature friezes composed from repeated images of an Asian woman and a man in drag. They are dressed in sexually provocative theatrical attire -- a French maid’s uniform, platform heels, garters and corsets, aristocrats’ waistcoats, tap shoes and such -- and they wield enormous swords.

This histrionic mixing of masculine and feminine tropes, rendered in the manner of old-fashioned illustration, is rather pedestrian. What gives it some edge is the frank ugliness of the drawn and painted surfaces, which seem to ooze a runny, viscous residue and to revel in bruised colors.

Given figures decked out like showgirls (and boys) in a Las Vegas revue, the dissonance between attraction and repulsion is at least unnerving.

Peres Projects, 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-1100, through June 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .peresprojects.com.

christopher.knight@latimes.com