Picasso, powerful and erotic

One of the joys of art history is that there are figures such as Pablo Picasso, whose breadth beggars casual comprehension (the only kind much of contemporary culture demands) and whose achievements seem assured of never becoming boring.

“Picasso: A Graphic View,” at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, is a welcome reminder of why such artists bear returning to again and again, however well you think you know them. A considered presentation of two particular bodies of work, the show feels like a long lunch with a beloved (and slightly dirty) old uncle, some of whose stories you’ve heard but all of which are marvelous in the telling.

The show combines a substantial selection of the artist’s ceramic works, from the 1940s through the 1960s, with a series of prints known as the Vollard Suite, after the Parisian dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned it in the early ‘30s. (A handful of later prints are also thrown in.) This is Picasso’s Neoclassical phase, more or less, when he abandoned Cubism for a dreamy figuration, mythological subjects, sensuous forms and slender, whimsical lines.

The prints, all in excellent condition, are especially rich examples of the period.

The themes are basically sex and art. Each composition is a swooning mass of interacting, overlapping, often interlocking bodies, cast in myriad archetypal relationships: man and mistress, mistress and beast, artist and model, artist and sculpture, model and sculpture, and so on.

Prominent throughout is the Minotaur, who stood as a kind of alter ego for the artist. (Picasso’s lover at the time, Marie-Thérèse Walter, also figures prominently.) In one of the most exquisite works, “Minotaure Caressant une Dormeuse” (Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman), the creature bends over a reclining female, its ferociously athletic limbs poised and its dark, hairy head hanging low above her tranquil face -- a grotesque mass of furious strokes over a visage composed of just a few elegant, effortless lines.

In an earlier phase of my feminist evolution, I might have pointed with disdain to the series’ often brazen objectification of the female. But far more interesting to me now is the intensity of ambivalence in the artist’s depictions of the male. The image of the hovering Minotaur, for instance, is as tragic as it is fearsome, as thick with tenderness as it is with violence and power. That dynamic is embodied even in the application of the lines: sharp drypoint strokes that lose their edge in places and seep sensually into the fuzz of the paper.

Picasso’s insight into the profound complexity of the various relationships he portrays is what makes the suite both so powerful and so erotic. In other works, we see the figure of the artist struggling pitifully over his creations; the man succumbing like a child to his lover’s embrace; and the model contemplating her own image alongside the artist, with a comparable air of intelligence.

In some of the later works, Picasso has more fun: “Dans l’Atelier du Sculpteur” (In the Sculptor’s Studio), from 1963, for instance, features three short, fat, naked men, their genitals reduced to capricious little squiggles, ogling a perfectly composed, utterly indifferent model.

Complementing the thematic complexity is a tireless degree of formal experimentation. In the Vollard Suite alone, the range of techniques is remarkable: delicate line drawing, dense thickets of crosshatching, diaphanous washes, harsh chiaroscuro -- sometimes all in the same piece. The ceramics include painted tiles, vessels, plates in bas-relief. They portray figures, animals and abstract motifs of various cultural origins. Some are one of a kind, some editions.

“All I have ever made,” Picasso once said, “was made for the present and in the hope that it will always remain in the present.” Encountered on a hot August afternoon in 21st century Los Angeles, this show makes that observation seem very much to the point.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-5222, through Sept. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .jackrutbergfinearts.com.

A vivid, distinct sense of place

Any lover of photography unfamiliar with the work of Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000) would do well to make time for a jewel of a survey now at the Italian Cultural Institute. With 59 works, the show offers a tantalizing sampling of a rich, influential career.

It spans nearly 50 years, from 1954 until the Italian photographer’s death, and encompasses several very different series. (All the works are printed at 30 by 40 inches; the majority are black and white.) The most distinctive through-line is a strong graphic sensibility that results in a constant flirtation with flatness and thus a shifting, uneasy relationship to Realism.

In some works, Giacomelli heightens the contrast to such a degree that his dark-clothed subjects -- priests frolicking in the snow in one especially charming series, aged townspeople in the streets in another -- take on an air of iconic significance, as if detached from the fabric of the real world. (Several of the priest photographs mimic Matisse’s famous painting of dancers joined in a circle.)

One series consists of aerial views of crop formations shot so that they resemble abstract paintings or prints. Another achieves a similar effect with the paint-chipped walls of buildings.

Some of the most beautiful works belong to a series from the early 1980s depicting sea gulls in flight over open fields. Several of these are printed in multiple exposures so that the forms of the birds jostle and overlap.

Despite the rigorous formal experimentation, the work retains a vivid and distinct sense of place, reflected in the furrows of the earth, the timeless garments of the priests, the piercing black eyes of a handsome young woman or the sagging shoulders of a city’s elderly.

Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood, (310) 443-3250, through Aug 31. Closed Sundays. www.iiclosangeles.esteri.it.

Messing with Mother Nature

“It seems the more we mess with Nature,” curator Pam Posey begins in the essay that accompanies “Nature (Interrupted),” her show at the 18th Street Arts Center, “the more she messes with us.”

This “embattled relationship,” as Posey puts it, is the subject of the thoughtfully organized, handsomely presented exhibition.

Maura Bendett’s two wall-mounted sculptures, “Melt” and “Photon Star,” are the most visually dazzling works: giddy explosions of baubles and beads (made from plastic, resin and paper draped on a many-limbed steel frame) that give a taste of what foliage might look like if Mother Nature were an especially creative 15-year-old girl.

Christine Nguyen’s “They Get Released to Conjure Up a Miracle” (a multi-paneled, semi-photographic piece made of sections of drawings rendered on Mylar and then run through a color film processor) and Lothar Schmitz’s “Strategy for Survival” (a large, free-standing sculpture of a hillside dotted with biodome-like half-globes) both feel like models or diagrams from some other world.

Joyce Campbell and Jeff Cain, by contrast, find the fantastic in the actual -- she in the glaciers of Antarctica, which she reproduces in large, elegant silver gelatin prints, and he in the strange and beautiful sound made by wind rushing through a cluster of radio towers on Mt. Wilson, which he’s recorded and incorporates in an installation called “Dead Air.”

The most surprising -- though in some ways most appropriate -- of the artists is Orlan, who has made a career of “messing with” the natural state of her own physiology by way of plastic surgery. Coming unexpectedly upon a petri dish containing preserved fragments of the artist’s flesh, in a piece called “Les petits reliquaires: ‘Ceci est mon corps . . . Ceci est mon logiciel’ ” (Little Reliquaries: “This is my body . . . This is my software”), isn’t especially pleasant, but it certainly drives the theme of the show home.

18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3711, through Sept. 14. Closed Saturdays and Sundays. www.18thstreet.org.

Like ‘50s lounge music, remixed

The paintings in Alexander Couwenberg’s deliciously titled exhibition at d.e.n. contemporary, “Cosmetically, Aesthetically, Unregrettably,” are the visual equivalent of 1950s lounge music remixed for the bar of some ultrahip boutique hotel: music that courts nostalgia without wallowing in it, that’s skillful, sexy and perfectly palatable, even if it’s not what you remember about the place in the morning.

Rendered in stencil-like layers of crisp, clean acrylic on polished birch panels, the paintings are abstract compositions laced with echoes of midcentury California Modernism (circles, surfboard shapes and rounded triangles reminiscent of guitar picks), refined well beyond kitsch but not quite to the point of aesthetic autonomy.

Between the handsome arrangements, the agreeable palette and the impeccable technique, these are appealing works just on the verge of being too much so. Couwenberg’s CV includes a long list of corporate collections, and it’s easy to see why: There’s not a lot to argue with here but not a lot to sink your teeth into either.

d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, through Aug. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.dencontemporaryart.com.