Focusing on life’s ragged edges

At a time when Martha Stewart and Donald Judd rule the world of design with such authority that nearly everything in it looks squeaky clean, it’s refreshing to come across Polly Apfelbaum’s new works. At Angles Gallery, the New Yorker’s first solo show in Los Angeles in five years celebrates the flip side of high-end shelter magazines. Her rapidly scrawled drawings on brightly colored swathes of velvet make a place for messiness in an over-tidy world of over-designed preciousness. They turn the whiplash abandon of making a mess into an ethos for life lived in the moment, with no holding back and everything laid on the line.

Line-work, or drawing, gives the exhibition its kick. Titled “Love Street,” its centerpiece is a 15- by 30-foot spread of 18 squares of synthetic pink velvet. Laid out on the main gallery’s floor, they resemble an unstitched quilt or a slew of makeshift sleeping mats in an overcrowded disaster relief center -- a shelter from the opposite end of the social spectrum from those in trendy magazines.

Apfelbaum used plastic ketchup bottles filled with black fabric dye to squirt dozens of roughly parallel lines in piecemeal patterns on each 5-foot-square section. Sometimes the lines run in the same direction as the fabric’s edges -- covering quarters, thirds and halves of each section, as if scribbled by a kid learning her fractions. Other lines march diagonally, forming triangles, diamonds and blurry-edged racing stripes. And some angle every which way, packing their sections like rush-hour subways.

Together, the mix-and-match patterns that collide across the fractured surface of “Pink Floyd” take the shape of a parquet floor cobbled together from scrap wood by a make-do journeyman without an overview and no time to step back and see the contours of her work. Give-it-a-go experimentation never looked better.

Walking around the piece makes its pink fields shift to rose and silvery white and its black lines to grayish silver. This recalls frost forming on snow-less winter lawns and then melting away as the sun rises.

A bigger surprise awaits viewers who look closely. Apfelbaum’s lines trace the profiles of crudely drawn snakes, with open mouths and single eyes.

The myriad reptiles do not slither in sensuous curves but are straight and angular, like those carved into rocks 30,000 years ago by our cave-dwelling ancestors. Packed together like sardines in a can, they do not evoke the menace of the biblical serpent but the contemporary dread of invisible contagions and the facelessness of being a statistic.

It’s impossible to focus on the snakes, the drawn patterns and the colorful velvet fields simultaneously. Instead, each element plays cat-and-mouse with its counterparts, making for participatory viewing experiences that evoke the subterfuge of Warhol’s camouflage paintings and his embrace of masquerade.

Apfelbaum’s other works pay more explicit homage to the father of Pop. “Orange Crush” uses his flower forms as springboards for a luscious field of supersaturated color that covers the floor of a second gallery. Two gorgeous pieces, on silk velvet casually push-pinned to the office walls, make sexy bedfellows of Jackson Pollock and Spirograph. And down the street in an auxiliary gallery, a suite of 32 silk-screens titled “Flags of Revolt and Defiance” links art and politics via the passions that fuel the fires of each.

Dark and ebullient, Apfelbaum’s double-edged works pack loaded emotions into simple symbols and swiftly drawn lines to capture the complexity of the moment.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

Restless and wild creatures

Wendell Gladstone’s six new paintings at Roberts & Tilton take visitors on dizzying trips to post-apocalyptic peaceable kingdoms, where sailors, skeletons and spirits, not to mention lions and tigers and apes, spend long afternoons contemplating the absurdity of it all. The creature comforts enjoyed by Gladstone’s men, beasts and totems do little to soothe the psychological restlessness of his vivid pictures, which give gripping form to the anxiety-riddled aftermath of cataclysmic fantasies.

In the nearly 7- by 5-foot “Mortal Reflection,” four castaways wearing masks and grass skirts cry a pool of tears in which their reflections appear. The myth of Narcissus is called to mind. But a raven and dove intrude, evoking Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic Americana and the biblical mystery of the Holy Spirit.

“Ritual Reenactment” features four skull-headed sailors stumbling ashore to find a plywood mastodon and a pair of gorillas, six bleached-white skeletons, a lion’s head rendered in the pointillist style of Paul Seurat, and two Tiki masks, crafted in the manner and palette of mosaics from Pompeii. Think “Planet of the Apes” meets “Pirates of the Caribbean” by way of a super-talented set designer with a taste for The History Channel and Animal Planet.

In other similarly scaled -- and similarly twisted -- images, a rope transforms itself into a tiger, a phoenix emerges from a tree stump and dozens of translucent skulls drip a rainbow of paint into a multicolored pond.

Gladstone paints like a sculptor, building each component of each object in each painting out of thick chunks of acrylic that often appear to have been carved or assembled, like the three-dimensional parts of real things. Their faceted slabs and fractured planes recall early computer graphics or handmade versions of pixilated imagery.

Imagine traveling to Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti by way of Ashley Bickerton’s malignant paintings of exoticism run amok. The emotional tenor of Gladstone’s paintings is a strange combination of serenity, fatalism and dread.

Stylistically, Gladstone draws on the painterly precision of Kevin Appel, the spiraling narratives of Lari Pittman and the iconic bluntness of Michael Lazarus. Most remarkably, he brings the hallucinatory weirdness of Jess’ paintings into the computer age, where it takes on a life of its own.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.robertsandtilton.com

Soapsuds and snowmen

“Bubbles and Snowmen” is among the more succinct shows of the season. At Mark Moore Gallery, it includes only five round paintings by Todd Hebert. Each pretty much depicts the same blurry scene: a snowman standing in a large field beneath a soft blue sky, the distant horizon defined by a gray cluster of leafless trees. All that seems to distinguish the visually subdued works is their diameters, which range from 18 inches to 5 feet, and the number of exquisitely rendered soap bubbles floating in their foregrounds -- from none to a couple of dozen.

Hebert’s quiet little exhibition is also among the most curiously fascinating. Despite its simplicity, it is acutely engaging.

Its freshness is all the more peculiar because Hebert’s paintings wear their affection and respect for several impressive historical precedents on their sleeves. Robert Irwin’s stunning disks come quickly to mind, as do Ed Ruscha’s terrifically illusionistic pictures of foamy soapsuds and Robert Therrien’s multi-size sculptures of abstract snowmen.

Even so, Hebert’s lovely paintings slip out from under the long shadows cast by these revered artists. Part of that is because his works do not take themselves too seriously. If you squint just a bit, it is easy to see his paintings as faces, with snowman noses and forest eyes -- which sometimes wink.

More important, Hebert’s oddly enchanting paintings sustain interest because they are even more difficult to hold in memory than they are to distinguish from one another. Each time you look at one, you feel as if you are seeing it for the first time, with fresh eyes and open mind. That’s an experience that is hard to come by and well worth savoring.

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Feb. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.markmooregallery.com

Is it art or entertainment?

Paul Pfeiffer’s new works at MC Gallery raise pointed questions about art’s relationship to entertainment. Unfortunately, the artist’s midsize sculptures, miniature videos and oversized photographs answer these timely questions in surprisingly old-fashioned terms, arguing that entertainment is a spectacularly superficial distraction and that art is a deeply serious enterprise that proves its gravitas by withholding pleasure and information.

Pfeiffer has built three approximately 6-foot-square plywood models of hangar-style buildings that rest on big pedestals. Two have doors that enable viewers to peek inside, where mini-projectors show videos of large audiences of seated people, waiting, fidgeting, yawning, chatting and occasionally chanting in unison. The third model has no doors but muffled sounds can be heard from its interior.

If you listen long enough, you begin to imagine a sort of back-and-forth, call-and-response conversation among the three models. If you read the press release, you learn that Pfeiffer has distorted a 1986 recording of Freddie Mercury’s voice. This information makes the installation seem even thinner, far less engaging than a live or recorded Queen concert, or even a written description of one.

Pfeiffer’s photographs of people playing, watching and talking about basketball likewise lack the drama of the real thing. Bad art, like bad entertainment, neither sticks in the mind’s eye nor makes you want to come back for more.

MC, 6086 Comey Ave., (323) 939-3777, through Feb. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.mckunst.com