A pattern and a potency develop

The nine paintings in John M. Miller’s “Now and Then” at Margo Leavin Gallery span 20 years, from 1986 to 2006, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at them. If the show can be considered a survey, it is a survey of an extraordinarily concentrated career. Indeed, the only obvious change to have occurred over those two decades is a shift in palette from what looks like white (sometimes off-white) to what looks like black (sometimes very dark blue, green or red).

In every other aspect, the paintings are virtually identical: the same, wallpaper-like motif -- a dizzying pattern of slightly skewed diagonal bars -- rendered in the same clean, hand-painted manner, on the same shade of raw canvas, in some variation of the same dimensions (square or rectangular, sometimes in multiple panels).

An artist who relies on so few elements had better be masterful in his handling of them, and that Miller is. The show is basically flawless: nary a smudge, nary a slip, and -- most impressively -- nary a dull moment. Between the fine technical execution and a meticulous balance of formal tensions -- tonal, graphic and compositional -- the works have a mysterious potency, each quivering at its own frequency against the white wall, creating a steady and weirdly hypnotic visual drone throughout the gallery.

The show’s centerpiece, installed directly opposite the front door, is a massive, five-paneled work appropriately titled “Bang.” Seven and a half feet tall and nearly 20 feet long, the piece is covered in uninterrupted pattern that at a glance looks black but actually shifts subtly from one panel to the next: black to green to blue to red to black. The work is a tangle of optical contradictions: a single, fixed horizontal bar that breaks down into five softly pulsating vertical bars, then disintegrates at close range into a slew of tiny diagonal bars. It is soothingly stable, even serene in its monumentality, yet vertiginous and agitated in its detail. This and two single-paneled accompanying works are the most recent in the show, all dated 2006. The side gallery includes three smaller works from the mid-1990s. One is a single panel of black (or dark gray) pattern; the other two are diptychs pairing one black-on-white panel and one white-on-white panel. The three works from the 1980s, in the front gallery, are all white (or cream) on white.

In a world dominated by the consumerist principles of distraction, novelty, variety and convenience, there’s something touching, even admirable about the repetition of so focused and meticulous an act: the application of a small bar of solid color to the surface of raw canvas. And Miller has perfected it. But like so much work developed out of the minimalist enterprise in the last 30 years, it presents itself as a closed system, detached from human concerns, with access depending largely on sympathy toward an indoctrinated notion of optical purity. The primary payoff for gaining admission is the experience of a kind of sensory hum, which can be intriguing, even stimulating, but doesn’t penetrate deeply and isn’t especially sustaining.

The news release describes the paintings as “urgent,” which is surprisingly apt, but one can’t help wondering: to what end?

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Cleverness with brown tubes

Yuken Teruya’s last exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, in 2004, featured a remarkably delicate series of sculptures involving trees cut from the paper of colorful shopping bags and suspended within the bags to create miniature dioramas. In the current show, his third with the gallery, he takes the same approach using the sort of brown cardboard tubes found inside toilet paper rolls.

The trees, cut out of the cardboard with a knife but still attached at the base, spring from the surface of the tubes like spirits released from bondage. The suggestion of a sort of reverse incarnation -- of restoring to the cardboard a semblance of its original state -- is clever, and it’s lovely to see such beautiful workmanship attempt to redeem so banal an object. Even more than with the shopping bags, however, which offered the advantage of color, the banality persists, leaving the works feeling more clever than poetic or graceful.

Another work, called “Lost and Found,” in which Teruya has cut dozens of tiny, seedling-like forms from the color images on the top layer of a pile of New York Times newspapers, has a livelier, more spontaneous feel.

A group show in the main space includes much larger work by three sculptors. With little in common besides their scale, the works make for a disadvantageously discordant exhibition but serve, individually, as promising introductions.

David Herbert’s engrossing “Last Stand at Big Thunder Mountain” is a 15-foot-tall foam and canvas reconstruction of a rocky peak with an abandoned mine, makeshift cemetery and an ominous cascade of yellow and green sludge. Jon Rajkovich’s slick plywood and cast resin sculpture “Jolly Roll” resembles a giant stick of pink bubble gum with one end rolled into a coil and the other extending inexplicably into a short flight of stairs and a horse’s head.

The most enchanting of the three works is Angela White’s “Art Is Sex, Sex Is Art,” a messy installation involving several turntables and a slew of ceramic fragments -- broken teacups, ornamental spoons, animal figurines and the like. Some of these sit on the turntables, spinning merrily; others hang on strings suspended from the gallery walls, clinking (and occasionally breaking) against the others as they spin. The wind chime-like cacophony is delightful.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Feb. 3. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.shoshanawayne.com

Taking light past illumination

The photographs in Scott B. Davis’ “Los Angeles Night” at Michael Dawson Gallery -- all platinum prints made with a large-format camera -- are quiet, careful pictures that convey a sense of the fundamental mechanics of light with unusual immediacy and clarity.

His subject is the typically light-drenched landscape of Southern California. In each picture, however, he goes out of his way to pare that light to one or two select sources: a single streetlight suspended over a shadowy storefront; the one illuminated window in a house atop a hill; a desert gas station glowing in the distance. Several images capture the luminescence of the city behind the contour of a dark hillside.

The result is a sense of light as raw material. In a traditional photograph, unlike a digital photograph, light is not merely illumination -- not just the thing that makes a space not dark -- but is the essence of the object, the thing that, in making contact with film and then paper, calls the image into being. As complex as digital technologies become, there’s still magic and great beauty in this comparatively simple process.

Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 469-2186, through Feb. 3. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.michaeldawsongallery .com

Welcome to the neighborhood

The milieu that Brooklyn-based painter Amy Bennett explores in her L.A. debut at Richard Heller Gallery -- a vaguely disquieting, subtly surreal brand of suburban life -- is familiar territory by now, but the lush quality of her technique and the peculiar eloquence of her sense of space make it worth revisiting.

The largest painting in the show, titled “Someday You Will Long for This” and about 3 feet high by 5 feet wide, serves as the show’s establishing shot: an aerial view of a small community of suburban houses, based on a model Bennett constructed in her studio.

The remaining 13 images, which range from 3 feet across to about 1 1/2 inches square, are all essentially details, drawn from some region of this imaginary neighborhood.

There are a few interiors, but these feel more or less like what they are: dollhouse models, stiff and rather bland. The rest portray the houses from the outside, adopting a swooping bird’s-eye view.

Bennett excels in the depiction of space and atmosphere, striking a peculiar balance between cinematic expansiveness and claustrophobic containment.

Her lawns are vast and smooth and a delicious shade of green, and her trees, full-bodied and painterly, are a pleasure. Rendered in oil on panel, the paintings are thick and exceptionally glossy, as if the pigment were mixed with molten glass, so that the air feels thick and wet. The sky in several is so pitch-perfect a shade of ominous gray that you can almost smell the rain.

Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.richardhellergallery.com