The view from the woods

Cezanne never struck me as being a Pop artist. Seurat, maybe, with his cool images of tawdry entertainment. And even Matisse, whose urbane idylls set the standard for intelligent hedonism. But Cezanne’s paintings of the French countryside seemed too serious, too rooted in the basics of nature to embrace the accessible ordinariness of Pop at its best.

David Hockney’s new paintings at L.A. Louver Gallery change all that. They make Cezanne look Pop, turning the granddad of Cubism into a painter of light-drenched landscapes made of whiplash shortcuts and shorthand gestures that seem subdued and distant but loaded with emotion.

Hockney’s quietly ravishing pictures also astonish because they depict the East Yorkshire landscapes of his native England as if they were interiors -- intimate spaces in which viewers are invited to kick back and relax, taking in the subtle splendors of daylight as it dances across leaves, cuts around branches and suffuses the space between trunks with tasty sensuality. The walls of the downstairs gallery have been painted “Eating Room Red,” a deliciously deep burgundy that suggests the hearty comforts of rustic hunting cottages endowed with all the amenities 19th century aristocrats would expect.

Each of its picture-window-size paintings depicts a perfectly ordinary bit of woods. The bright greens, saturated lavenders, hazy grays and high-keyed oranges pop against the deep burgundy backdrop.

Hockney painted the five works from the same spot in the Woldgate Woods, standing in the middle of a little dirt road just before it branches into three paths, disappears over a slight rise and then reappears in the distance, in a clearing where the light does funny things with perspective and depth perception. He made each six-panel oil on canvas in two- or three-day sessions last year, from March to November, after schlepping everything he needed to that spot in the woods, setting up a lawn chair, looking carefully and then painting furiously. The results are stunning.

Each picture is unlike any other. The one from July is a symphony of verdant greens, more luscious than Henri Rousseau’s fantasy landscapes. A November painting is an explosion of vibrant oranges, its ground blanketed by a bed of fallen leaves that makes it seem as if terra firma has gone spongy. A second November painting is all gauzy light, the crisp vividness of the woods softened to the point of dissolving in the purple-gray fog.

Upstairs, the paintings are smaller and the colors brighter -- a rainbow of aqua, lime-green and golden yellow. The skylights bathe everything in a warm glow.

These nine landscapes recall Hockney’s plein-air watercolors from two years ago, but they add more sumptuousness and muscle. In each, he marries intimacy and expansiveness, using his eye for portraiture to create wonderfully detailed close-ups of trees, bushes and vines, all set among patchwork fields and beneath skies that seem to reach into infinity.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com.

Taking a dark turn during dark times

Stephanie Pryor’s new paintings turn the visual dynamics of her old ones inside-out. In the past, Pryor painted fluid abstractions on pristine white panels, many of which were 6 feet long. The washy puddles of paint sometimes suggested the silhouettes of wild animals, big cats and lumbering mammals that momentarily emerged from swirling stews of bright colors and then dissolved back into them, leaving abstract compositions charged with raw energy and startling potential.

At Acme Gallery, the animals take center stage in Pryor’s first solo show in Los Angeles in five years. Rather than drifting into focus, hovering on the threshold of perceptibility and then quietly vanishing into the background, each beast explodes into consciousness like a shotgun blast on a silent winter morning. Pryor’s wolves, bears, deer and horses do not go gently into the night. They howl, roar and stampede as if fighting, tooth and nail, against their disappearance from a toxic world.

Twelve of the 18 juicy, gestural acrylics are no bigger than sketchbook pages. The biggest of the other six measures 4 feet by 3 feet. By limiting the size of her works, Pryor concentrates their focus and intensifies their effect. They read well from a distance and even better up close: intimate, haunting, unforgiving.

Pryor paints like a watercolorist, first applying numerous finely sanded layers of icy white gesso, swiftly brushing on thin washes of watered-down acrylic and then adding increasingly thick, eventually opaque layers. There’s no going back or painting over, and the one-shot finality shows in the works’ all-or-nothing, fight-or-flight decisiveness.

The colors are darker: inky blacks, loamy browns, bloody reds and smoldering oranges set against acidic greens, unnatural pinks, shimmering purples and metallic gold.

The clean white grounds that once gave Pryor’s paintings the freshness of coloring book pictures are now clouded over by thin layers of dirty gray, like memories dimmed by time or views through smog-coated windows.

Scale shifts dramatically within and among Pryor’s paintings. Seemingly solid objects dissolve into nothingness and apparently intangible shadows become ghostly presences. This creates the impression of groping through dense woods or blindly stumbling in the dark.

The images are blurry and often indistinct, but they are not ambiguous or uncertain. This is dark art about dark times. Pryor pointedly registers the tragedy of vanishing beauty and the violence lurking beneath the surface of modern life.

Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through March 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com.

The meaning of time and space

A series of 14 ink drawings by Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) travels to a time when art was a lot less polished than it is today. At Thomas Solomon Gallery @ Rental Gallery, Matta-Clark’s swift sketches outline a type of pedestrian poetry both lean and romantic, utterly efficient in its unsentimental simplicity yet almost dreamy in its willingness to tackle big subjects.

Time and space -- and how an individual wrestles meaning from both -- are what Matta-Clark’s drawings are all about. But directly addressing such profound subjects is too grandiose for these unpretentious images. They make a virtue of casual quickness to demonstrate where freedom is often found.

Although Matta-Clark’s untitled drawings are just over 1 foot tall and from 1 to 5 feet long, they have the presence of notes jotted on bar napkins or messages left on scrap paper. To survey the show is to feel as if you’re peeking into someone’s mind. Narrative secrets are not revealed; instead, you get to watch a thought process in action.

Some drawings look logical. Space recedes according to rules of perspective, consistently and coherently adding up to a schematic panorama that has the sweep and feel of big-screen movies. Others follow a part-by-part format that recalls frames of films, which Matta-Clark sometimes crumples together to compress time, or distends to expand it.

In still others he seems to have depicted the same architectural structure from two points of view, as if walking around it or watching it rotate in space like an animated cartoon. The smallest work resembles mutant calligraphy, fragments of a lost language whose graceful forms still resonate.

The best drawings combine various types of representation in rebus-like setups. They switch back and forth among architectural imagery, cinematic panoramas, sputtering doodles, calligraphic notation and abstract, quasi-mathematical accounting.

Thomas Solomon Gallery @ Rental Gallery, 936 Mei Ling Way, Chinatown, (310) 428-2964, through March 10. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

Injecting life into ordinary materials

“Surrealism for Kids” could be the subtitle of “The Object,” a five-artist exhibition at Carl Berg Gallery. Ordinary objects and mundane materials take on lives of their own as the L.A. sculptors gently push them in suggestive directions and then set them loose, leaving them free to do their own things in a viewer’s imagination.

Gwen Pool’s enchanting diorama gets the show off to a great start. Lovingly crafted of crocheted and knitted yarn, Jell-O molds and homemade bicycle wheels, “To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn” depicts a fantastic land of Ferris wheels, desktop fans, rolling hills and Op art patterns.

If Chris Burden collaborated with a bunch of farmland grandmothers to form an avant-garde quilting bee, Pool’s piece is what they might make. Its charm does not mollify its kick or sugarcoat Pool’s bittersweet vision of relentless suburban sprawl and the transformation of America into a cheesy theme park.

Jessica Minckley’s “A Remorseful Reduction” struggles to marry the story of Little Red Riding Hood to Bruce Nauman’s animal sculptures while adding a nautical theme. Lynn Aldrich’s “Rogue” is simpler and more successful, turning a few hundred feet of green garden hoses into a playfully menacing rogue wave.

Alison Foshee gets a lot out of cut and pasted candy wrappers and heart-shaped paper doilies. They transform one corner of the gallery into an abstract pond packed with lily pads and lotus flowers.

Steve DeGroodt’s two wall-works round out the show. Made of fabric, plywood and cord, these 3-D doodles evoke puffy clouds, studio scraps, tangled parachutes and written words that imploded. The mix of materials and metaphors is felicitous, just the thing to set the imagination in motion.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-6060, through March 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.carlberggallery.com.