A can-do spirit and a comical approach

Nathan Redwood’s rollicking, rapturous work at Carl Berg Gallery has a touch of the great William Wiley’s spirit -- somewhere in its subtle irreverence, its disheveled tightness, its vaguely rustic wisdom. Somewhere in the feeling that ingenuity is the most effective compositional device for holding a picture together and making it rattle with urgency.

This is Redwood’s first solo show in L.A., his newly adopted home. It contains four large paintings (a fifth, in the back of the gallery, is technically not part of the show), each packed with visual verve and wry humor and saturated with an intriguing, elusive mood that borrows from both doom and celebration.

The show’s title, “Construction Under the Sun,” itself seems delivered with a snort. True, the forms in the paintings look hammered together from construction debris, but their solidity feels tenuous, challenged by a beautifully chaotic, entropic force that pervades every scene. And the sun? It seems to have taken a long vacation from this world. A gothic pallor chills the air in one of the paintings. A toxic grayish-yellow sky burns in another.

All of the images are devoid of humans, but each has human surrogates. What they’re doing resembles rites of survival, especially if the environments are taken to be post-calamity. In “Space Between,” bodiless gloves grip the sides and rungs of ladders that rise, without visible support, out of a skittish brown earth. In “Snap,” two makeshift rafts bob in a choppy sea.

Redwood paints with diluted acrylic polymers, often applying lighter tones atop darker ones, which gives the surfaces a liveliness and dimensionality at a determined remove from conventional naturalistic representation. Colors are blended in a minor key, lending the whole an underlying dissonance. The brushwork is bold. Every stroke maintains its own integrity while contributing to the overall illusion of place, depth, movement. It’s a compelling style, at times ravishing in its effects.

In the painting of rafts at sea, for instance, Redwood crafts a spectacular division between the water’s surface and its murky, alien depths. The brushwork of broad wavy strokes articulating the water seen from above comes to a clean break near the bottom of the canvas. An intense light gleams just below the dividing line, then dissipates into drippy, fuzzy streaks.

The downward flow of the paint reinforces the pull of anchoring weights (bricks tied in rope) strangely connected to the rafts’ masts. The cool, palpable strokes defining the water’s surface, the visible world, contrast brilliantly with the warm, amorphous netherworld.

In “Conductor,” a campfire scene of sorts, Redwood again combines pigments of different viscosity to wonderfully disarming effect. The sky weeps like runoff from corroded metal; cloud-like forms within it appear as if extruded from giant tubes of liquid rust.

The reference to construction in the show’s title applies as much to Redwood’s inventive engineering of the painted surface (the eye’s path all switchback trails and rickety bridges) as to the odd contraptions he depicts within. Scraps of wood connect at awkward angles to form literal stick figures with scrappy ribs and bucket heads. One, in “Conductor,” wears a collared shirt from which springs a large, unfurling coil in place of a head.

Unlikely combinations of wood and rope, stone and car tires have the comical/mechanical air of something built by Rube Goldberg or staged by Fischli and Weiss. There is also something in the reference to resourcefulness with materials that brings to mind found-object assemblage. Redwood draws from multiple sources, but the fantastic, swampy, contingent, agitated, whimsical and foreboding concoction he creates is distinctly his own.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-6060, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.carlberggallery.com.

Showing shifts in the landscape

You can’t see the same landscape twice, to paraphrase Heraclitus’ truism about the mutability of all things. The view will be different each time -- as will the viewer.

Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin’s quietly voluptuous paintings at L.A. Louver bear this out, especially the sequence of nine small scenes overlooking treetops down into a valley.

The parameters of each image are identical, but everything within -- light, color, atmosphere -- shifts from canvas to canvas.

A distant meadow is a neutral field in one piece, an emerald oasis in another.

The nearest tree frizzles with warm afternoon light in one scene, and in another it emerges out of an obliterating fog as a pale, skeletal apparition.

The paintings are the scale of snapshots (4 by 7 inches) but temporally their opposite, not grabbed on the quick but the product of sustained scrutiny. For Rubin, whose last show here featured tightly controlled, highly contrived still-lifes, this focus on the natural world, close to her Northern California home, introduces a welcome note of intimacy. These expansive, external views chronicle an interior dedication to place and the continuous moment.

In “Late Summer Fog,” a glorious panoramic sweep of gently undulating fields, wheat-like grasses blur in the wind. Fog settles like a milky scrim, muting the volume as the landscape recedes into a dense gray blanket of noiselessness. This side of the fog, a small pond rings a clear blue tone. Beyond, the atmosphere softens equally vivid greens to a whisper. In these restorative works, thinking (lately the dominant process in art-making) yields to seeing; the skilled hand and grateful eye align.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.lalouver.com.

For every up there’s a down

B. Wurtz’s assemblage sculptures at Richard Telles Fine Art are seesaws for the mind, every elevation countered by a descent. They oscillate between defiantly charming and insistently dumb, between appealingly humble and absurdly thin.

Wurtz uses materials that are ordinary (plastic shopping bags, light-switch plates, shoelaces, newspaper ads, wire, wood scraps and plastic lids from food containers) and makes a convincing case for their limited poetic possibility. Another artist, such as Tara Donovan, might shape something transcendent from the same stuff, but Wurtz tamps down any grandiose notions. His work states the obvious more than it tweaks the familiar into a condition of unfamiliarity.

A lamp-like construction with a shade made of strips of plastic bags is slightly endearing. It hints of consumerist self-portraiture, the bags representing a range of necessities, including food, pharmaceuticals, books, music, chocolate and, ironically in Wurtz’s case, art supplies. A sweet tease, the piece stands adjacent to a frustratingly empty taunt, a large square of raw canvas fringed with plastic bags and collaged with fragments of the bags, some scattered at random, some spelling out the word “here.”

Wurtz has been making and exhibiting work of this sort (and more, in a variety of media) for nearly three decades. He’s often compared to Richard Tuttle and claims Warhol and Duchamp as influences.

There’s certainly something fresh about his work, but also something terribly tired. That seesaw motion between childlike innocence and sophisticated, CalArts strategy amounts to a wearying ride.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

www.tellesfineart.com.

Dad’s dreams and a child’s innocence

Cross the autobiographical, storytelling tableaux of Carmen Lomas Garza with the outsider zealotry of Howard Finster and you’ll get something akin to the work of Esther Pearl Watson. In a dozen paintings on view at La Luz de Jesus, Watson, a locally based, Art Center-trained illustrator and zine artist, effectively adopts a faux-naive, unschooled style to chronicle her childhood memories.

Most of the scenes feature rural Texas landscapes marked by effort (neat rolls of hay) or neglect (littered bottles and fast-food trash). Watson skews perspective, tilting up and flattening out the land, the same way she mixes upper- and lowercase letters in the extended titles written on the paintings. Both lend her work the raw charm of the untrained.

Above the patchwork-quilt fields hover flying saucers like those built, according to the suspiciously rustic artist’s bio, by Watson’s father, an eccentric who would show up for the school art show in “futuristic” dress.

He also promised his kids that he would fly them to school in one of his saucers, but drove them instead in a pickup.

The wishful scene -- of the silver vessel with its hair-dryer engines floating over the school, wondrous classmates below pointing up in awe -- captures the moment when the dream-lives of father and child converge. It’s an escapist fantasy that Watson recalls wistfully and tenderly, through eyes not yet dimmed by disillusionment. Whether memories or fictions, the paintings hum with authenticity when they evoke that craving for redemption shared by small-town teenage girl and visionary inventor alike.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 666-7667, through Jan. 28. Open daily. www.laluzdejesus.com.