Living friskily is best revenge

The milieu at “Milieu” is chaotic and jumpy. In the lively group exhibition of five artists at the Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, a funeral is a fandango, soccer is less sport than brawl and, when the personal is political, personal adornment becomes political action. Art is cast as a kind of pickup match composed of serious ad hoc play.

Eric Wesley’s disconcerting “Frit Display” is an elegant black mannequin-hand attached to the handle of a brutal knife blade that has been thrust into a pedestal top. Draped around the slender wrist is a slinky bracelet made from a chain of three skinny French fries cast in solid gold.

Since that precious ore has been a historic motivation for European colonial incursion and brutality, the juxtaposition of elements in Wesley’s sculpture generates contradictory thoughts of glamour and gore, sex and violence, high fashions and low deeds. A handout notes that the word frit is French for fried -- and paradoxically, given this slave-labor context, in French it’s pronounced “free.”

But it’s also a slang term meaning ruined -- as in “Il est frit” (He’s done for). Chic is rarely shocking, but Wesley gets provocatively, productively close.

A horizontal painting of wide green acrylic stripes by Chris Beas is overlaid with the linear white markings of a soccer field. A wry international twist is given to the specifically American artistic tradition of abstract field-paintings.

In other works, soccer action figures are orchestrated into exuberant, tangled clusters. It’s impossible to distinguish an altercation from a dance, a game pitch from a mosh pit or a lusty orgy from a fierce battle. Lines of clarity blur.

Likewise blurred is Allyson Spellacy’s snarky show title wedged into a corner, which she stenciled in drippy black paint dots on the white gallery wall (and on a bit of windowpane). A paint-splattered white lab coat hanging adjacent to the sign completes her “Milieu,” its homemade Prada label making a rude contemporary joke out of a designer stand-in for an artist’s smock.

Spellacy’s artful messiness pales next to Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s installation, in which a foul-smelling tent is draped with butter-yellow cloth, surrounded by busted office equipment, stacks of packaged bagel sandwiches, sacks of CDs and other assorted junk. Music hints at amusements hidden inside the makeshift hobo camping ground. But the work is rather too vague in its particulars -- and too specific in its recollection of Jason Rhoades’ chaotic sculptural mash-ups -- to draw us in.

That’s not a problem for Luis Gispert’s weirdly captivating “Pony Show.” The assemblage is apparently composed just from found materials, and they turn a funeral procession into a celebration of life.

An African litter in the homemade painted-plywood shape of a Mercedes limousine is propped atop booming speakers, from which hip-hop rhythms blare. (The music was salvaged from a pirate radio station in Miami.) A small flat-screen TV inside the limo-hearse plays a continuous loop of snapshots gleaned from personal Internet websites, most of them showing families, hobbies, parties and other everyday pleasures.

The milieu championed in this quirky show, which was organized by Martha Otero, is a frisky environment of soulful collegiality in the face of a hostile world. Partly it works because utopian fantasy is set aside in favor of empirical truth.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-1073, through Aug. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lizabetholiveria.com

On a twisting, turning path

Classic New York abstraction is sometimes identified with the big brush stroke. Since the 1980s, James Nares has been parsing that long-established idea. The New York artist’s new paintings at the Michael Kohn Gallery show how deft he’s become at injecting some life into an otherwise tired cliché.

Each work is composed of a single gestural brush stroke of intensely pigmented, oil-based paint on a snow-white ground. You can see where the proverbial “loaded brush” -- and I do mean loaded, given the visible volume of paint -- first hit the canvas. And you also know where the meandering stroke petered out at the other end.

In between is a circuitous path of twists, turns, feints, dodges and changes of heart (and mind). The calligraphy feels slow and dense, rather than quick and expressive, and sometimes recalls such things as the movement of a dancing dragon at a Chinese New Year’s parade.

Each rectangular canvas, whether vertical or horizontal, is more than 7 feet long. Nares achieves the mark with a homemade apparatus in which he suspends himself over a canvas laid flat, dragging a broom-size brush across the surface. The fat, lush, bright line of streaked color -- crimson, emerald, sapphire, gold -- is an abstract narrative of painterly maneuvering.

Three square works are 55 inches on a side, but in each of those the brush stroke takes the longer path across the diagonal. In contrast with the more languorous rectangles, the squares feel crisp and compressed.

These brush stroke paintings’ ancestry is in Roy Lichtenstein’s 1960s Pop works, in which Abstract Expressionist marks are rendered as cartoon images, and they play off David Reed’s painterly manipulations of space from the 1970s and after. They’re distinctive, though, because of the directness of Nares’ brushwork and the relationships to Asian art.

The works are composed from actual brush marks, yet simultaneously they look like pictures of brush strokes, one step removed. Pictorial qualities subsume the emotions we usually attach to gestures of the brush. The odd result is bodily paintings that are visually disembodied.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (310) 658-8088, through Aug. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com

Social codes and nature’s ways

The Internet is a trove of visual information for artists, and lots of them have been gaily picking through the debris. For his first Los Angeles solo show in five years, Phil Bower is showing five new paintings that derive from pictures found on personal websites.

It has been said that, historically, any time a new image medium has been invented -- prints, photographs, movies, video, the Internet -- pornography is among the first categories of pictures to proliferate. People want to see what they are forbidden to look at in the flesh. At the Carl Berg Gallery, Bowers’ paintings show naked heterosexual coupling outdoors at rustic sites -- in the woods, at a rocky beach, next to a lake or stream.

The chosen images keep all the naughty bits out of view, while the faces are uniformly hidden, cropped, obscured or turned away. But the action is clear. The natural setting frames the anonymous characters as latter-day Adams and Eves, busily engaged in events surrounding their unfortunate fall.

Whether that makes the viewer into a surrogate for the angry Almighty or the gleeful serpent is a tossup. But Bowers gives us some intriguing cues. The paintings are photo-based, but they have been abstracted.

Shapes are smooth, surfaces polished, the edges softened. The color has an almost metallic sheen, approaching iridescence. In a waterside frolic, “Blue and White Striped Towel,” the tree branches that obscure the sex act have been gently turned into something out of early Mondrian, just before he flipped the organic landscape into a geometric grid of pluses, minuses and arcs.

These subtle yet visible aesthetic decisions have the effect of creating visual friction between what naturally occurs and what’s socially determined. The explicit element in Bowers’ curiously ingratiating work is not the sex but the predicament lurking in the subject matter.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Saturday. www.carlberggallery.com

Cows? They’re very dog-like

Glen Wexler is a digital wiz, seamlessly manipulating elaborate photographic imagery into playful fictions. But the story he has to tell in “The Secret Life of Cows” is inane.

At the Track 16 Gallery, Wexler’s jokey narrative photographs of a bovine deep-sea diver swimming with the sharks, a cat burglar climbing a vertiginous building and a super-spy with a busty girlfriend are worthy of the commercial advertising campaign that inspired the series. But that’s about all.

Comparisons to photographs by William Wegman, the artist who 30 years ago began to cast dogs in human roles to question our assumptions about the expressive self assumed to be lurking inside a work of art, are as superficial as Wexler’s pictures. The appropriate comparison is not to Wegman but to paintings of dogs playing poker. The cows are mass-consumption pastiches updated for the Digital Age.

Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through Saturday. www.track16.com