Bengston frames his retirement

If, in the wake of any of the periodic tributes to L.A. art in the 1960s (there’s one up now at LACMA), you’ve found yourself wondering whatever happened to Billy Al Bengston, his website offers this report: “Billy Al is retired, doing all the things one shouldn’t do while retired. Eventually, he plans on having a show of all the things he didn’t do while retired. And, he’s building a studio in Victoria, British Columbia. But what for?”

“Billy Al Bengston,” at the Patricia Faure Gallery, is presumably that show: a splendid presentation of new work that seriously underscores the irony in his use of the word “retired.”

The artist, who moved from L.A. to Canada in 2004, appears in a photograph on the gallery’s own website looking every bit the healthy Northwesterner: lime green fleece vest, blue corduroy shorts and tennis shoes, his compact figure slightly blurred as he passes in front of one of the show’s largest paintings.

The blur is telling. With 47 works in all, ranging in size from 5 by 7 inches to more than 15 feet tall -- all but one dating from this year -- the show is an impressively energetic undertaking. Even the gallery has been reconfigured. The rear project-room has been fashioned into a square with a lower, skylighted ceiling and cream-colored floor, and the main space is bisected by a large raw-plywood wall and doorway -- a site-specific installation echoing a house shape that appears in several of the paintings.

The work is not a radical departure from earlier strains of Bengston’s oeuvre, nor is it a simple rehashing of previous tropes. The impression, rather, is of a meditative continuum: a long career spent absorbed in the dynamics of surfaces.

The majority of paintings involve a single, centralized motif -- a heart in most cases, a leaf or (rather perplexingly) the silhouette of a gymnast in others -- typically framed in a nested progression of squares. The predominant technique is a sprayed application of pigment, with thick droplets of uneven sizes.

The mid-size pieces that open the show didn’t, initially, stop me in my tracks. The tones are so mild-mannered as to suggest, at a glance, a doctor’s office, and it’s difficult to get around the banality of the heart motif (even if that’s part of the point).

What did stop me were the half-dozen hanging scrolls -- most about 15 by 10 feet -- installed in the main space beyond the plywood wall. Initially created for the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar but apparently withheld in response to the recent upheaval in that country, the paintings evoke views of a night sky, with thin mists of color -- purples and blues, primarily -- floating across a black ground and a handful of planet-like spheres hovering in loosely triangular formations. Each painting, while suggesting a glimpse into infinity, also resembles a face.

The scale of the pieces alone is impressive, but the effect of encountering them in the enclosed space created by the wall -- free of the square frames that predominate within the smaller paintings but still feeling safely ensconced -- is thrilling.

The experience leaves one considerably more receptive to the subtleties of the smaller works: to the delicate variations in tone, for instance, the careful layering and the rigorous array of textural contrasts. Bengston often interrupts the pixilated fields of sprayed pigment with stenciled passages of thick, sensual brush strokes. He balances geometric effects against atmospheric ones, viscous against dry, metallic against matte, spontaneity against containment.

This is a “retirement,” one gathers, of untiring exploration.

Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B7, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Dec. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.patriciafauregallery.com

-- Saar takes cues from her daughter

The mother-daughter relationship has been a defining theme in Lezley Saar’s work, implicitly and explicitly, throughout her career, given the legacy she inherited from her mother, assemblage artist Betye Saar, and shares with her sister, Alison. (A major survey of the three women’s intertwining careers is currently touring the country.)

Saar’s most recent body of work at the Walter Maciel Gallery marks a curious shift in that it stems not from her mother (or the matrilineal inheritance of feminism generally) but specifically from her relationship with her teenage daughter -- and it looks markedly different from anything she’s done to this point.

If Saar’s past work tended to be figurative, historically minded and immersed in the politics of identity, with roots in the traditions of folk art and assemblage, this show is like a trip down the rabbit hole. Black-and-white photographs, all taken by the artist and cut into circular shapes, float through each composition like bubbles of memory entangled in fantastical ink drawings.

The reason for the difference -- not obvious in the work but stated in the show’s news release -- is that Saar’s daughter is autistic. The works’ peculiarly poetic titles stem from things her daughter has said (“Ladies & Gentlemen, again, hazing is not safe near anybody,” “Well, consider this about villains of the month,” “No guests eating other guests,” “Fole is a cool name for friend”). The imagery suggests a world viewed through a distorted but rich and complicated imaginative lens.

In expressing ambivalence about the overtly political nature of the artist’s earlier work, a critic writing in Artforum once concluded: “It’s when Saar runs the risk of simply painting a strange picture that she produces her most interesting work.” In this show, the “simply painting a strange picture” impulse appears to have taken over entirely, and the critic was right: The result is dazzling.

It is not, however, a simple gesture but one of profound compassion and intense curiosity: a mother’s attempt to step out of her own skin and into that of her daughter, to open herself to the mystery of the experience while preserving the intelligence and clarity that has always given her work substance.

Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 839-1840, through Nov. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.waltermacielgallery.com

-- Inviting look at female experience

“Time Sensitive,” Barbara Zucker’s lovely micro-survey at Another Year in LA, assembles a little more than a dozen works from 1966 to the present to offer an abbreviated tour of a career devoted to investigating the female experience.

With its cluster of antique furniture upholstered in hot pink vinyl, its pink print wallpaper and the cheerful refrains of a Doris Day-like song called “Painting Pictures” (actually written and performed by the artist’s aunt in 1950), it is a cozy but extremely inviting installation.

The earliest works are respectable but a touch formulaic -- more compelling as reflections of feminist concerns at the time than as aesthetic objects in their own right.

Zucker hits her stride after 2000, however, particularly with a series called “Time Signatures.” In these works, she translates the patterns of lines in individual women’s faces -- her own and those of famous female art writers such as Lucy Lippard and Linda Nochlin -- into free-floating, seemingly abstract forms made from curving sheets of cut steel. (This is also the pattern that appears on the wallpaper.) They’re beautiful objects, fusing the formal lessons of Minimalism, the psychological sensitivity of feminism and the resonance of personal experience.

Another Year in LA, 2121 N. San Fernando Road, No. 13, Los Angeles, (323) 223-4000, through Nov. 16. Closed Saturday and Monday. www.anotheryearinla.com

-- Skillful paintings lack rough edge

There is much to appreciate in “While the Trucks on the Highway All Howl,” Joe Sorren’s first show at Billy Shire Fine Arts (after three at La Luz de Jesus Gallery): the artist’s gentle handling of paint, his luscious surfaces and subtle modulations of tone, the psychological ambiguity of his compositions, the pathos of his broad-browed, clumsy-fingered characters. He is an excellent painter with an intriguing sensibility.

It took me well into the show to pinpoint what kept it from clicking with me -- and what often seems to afflict artists with a background (and success) in illustration. It’s something like the curse of the beautiful girl who longs for a career as a dramatic actress: Technical skill, like beauty, can be a limitation when an artist is reaching toward deeper emotions. It’s difficult to believe tragedy -- or even real pathos -- when it comes from too neatly composed a face.

It is not the beauty -- or in this case, the virtuosity -- that hampers the work so much as the inability to shake it off when need be: the reluctance to lose control. I found myself longing for a rough spot, a slip, a fissure in Sorren’s impressive pictorial coherence, just to see what demons it might bring up.

Billy Shire Fine Arts, 5790 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 297-0600, through Dec. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.billyshirefinearts.com