Dingle’s return is delicious

In the 1990s, Kim Dingle made a name for herself as one of L.A.’s best painters. She bought a big raw studio space in Eagle Rock, where she could paint and restore her British sports cars. But things didn’t go as planned.

One morning, Dingle’s desire for a cup of strong hot coffee got the best of her. With nowhere to get one in the neighborhood, she opened and ran Fatty’s. The vegetarian wine bar consumed every waking minute of her life, leaving no time to work on cars, much less make paintings. The loudest voices in the art world greeted these developments with I-told-you-so-sanctimony, wagging their fingers at Dingle for trying to do more than was humanly possible.

At Kim Light/Lightbox, Dingle’s first solo show in Los Angeles in 10 years demonstrates that if you’re sufficiently talented, you can eat your cake and have it too. “The Cake Series” reveals an artist at the top of her game. Its 11 deliciously sophisticated -- and disarmingly simple -- oils on linen suggest that Dingle’s hiatus from painting not only did not diminish her art, but sharpened its focus and amplified its resonance.

In the larger of two galleries, nine mid-size paintings (all 5 feet by 4 feet) depict anonymous little girls abandoning their manners, their civility, their very selves to the all-or-nothing intensity of pure, animal satisfactions. Some dive headfirst into cakes that are just about as big as they are. Others bury their faces in thick gobs of frosting. One nuzzles up to a big gray cake -- like an exhausted lover or hibernating bear cub. And another collapses, like a drunk in the street. In every juicy painting, pleasure takes the upper hand and food gets the best of the girls.

There’s something feral in Dingle’s daintily dressed lasses, whose sweetness, vulnerability and innocence are all the more real for existing alongside ferocity, wildness and forget-the-consequences decisiveness.

The same goes for the way Dingle paints.

Some of her pictures are better than others. Although all are dated 2007, it isn’t difficult to guess the rough sequence in which they were finished. The early ones look a little stiffer, more carefully composed and properly realized. They suggest an old pro working off the rust and getting back into the groove. The most recent are the loosest, the blurriest, the most furiously rendered. In them, painterly abandon and pictorial coherence play tug of war. Dingle handles the violent to-and-fro with graceful elan, juicing up the drama with casual confidence.

Two of the boldest paintings occupy the smaller gallery. A diptych shows the aftermath of a birthday party, and a single-panel painting depicts a figure standing alone, her shoulders slumped and head bent in the posture of a penitent from a medieval or Renaissance religious painting. Chocolate is all over the place, dripping excrementally. Empathy is the predominant sentiment.

Dingle’s mundane subjects allow her to address big issues without getting heavy-handed. Philip Guston did something similar with his cartoonish paintings of hooded figures. If Charles Schulz and Willem de Kooning had collaborated, their works might resemble Dingle’s. But if they ran a restaurant, it wouldn’t be anything like Fatty’s.

Kim Light/Lightbox, 2656 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-1111, through Dec. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kimlightgallery.com

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Turning surfaces into kaleidoscopes

Carole Caroompas’ paintings don’t stop you in your tracks, like icons. Nor do they lure you into 3-D worlds, with deep space and sensible story lines.

Instead, the L.A. artist’s four new paintings and one drawing at Western Project lay everything they’ve got on their densely interwoven surfaces, where they transform the image-glut of modern life into a hallucinatory stew that’s impossible to digest and even harder to take your eyes off.

A typical painting by Caroompas begins when she glues, to the canvas’ pristine surface, napkins or tablecloths embroidered with smiling sugar cups, dancing utensils or scantily clad babes wrapping themselves around cocktail glasses. She then paints over the fabrics and canvas, depicting, in her signature style of DIY illustration, scenes from movies and TV shows, as well as imagery from nursery rhymes, rock videos, Gothic novels, Victorian dramas, German folk tales and American billboards, school books and newspapers.

Caroompas weaves together this polyglot melange with patterns and palettes borrowed from Navajo Eye-Dazzler rugs. Their zig-zagged diagonals provide electrifying backgrounds.

The cast of characters in “Dancing With Misfits: Eye-Dazzler: An Eastern Western-Cowboy Mummy” includes Karen Carpenter, Jane Fonda (as Barbarella), Montgomery Clift, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable (from “The Misfits”), Sissy Spacek (from “Carrie”), Jack and Jill, a little teapot, and an ostrich dancing with a doll that resembles Louis XIV.

Lenny Bruce, Tiny Tim and his wife appear in other works, all of which tap into the scrappy punk impulse at the heart of 1970s Pattern-and-Decoration painting. Caroompas adds Sphinx-like enigma to its think-for-yourself ethos, creating a brand of home-brewed Realism that captures the tenor of our times.

Pop was not supposed to be this complicated, but in Caroompas’ hands the easy-to-read style pushes viewers into a realm in which logic falls short. Her fractured pictures insist that instantaneous gratification is neither, and that art is not meant for everyone -- certainly not folks with no taste for uncertainty or unsettling coincidences.

Think of Caroompas not simply as an American artist, but as an Americana artist -- a salt-of-the-earth devotee of mass-cultural phenomena, who, in marching to her own beat, makes paintings filled with kaleidoscopic insights into the weirdness all around us.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western-project.com

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Conventions don’t stand a chance

Anna Sew Hoy’s installation at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery looks as if it’s the offspring of a trading post from the Old West and a high-end boutique from Beverly Hills. Both primitive and sophisticated, raw and refined, Sew Hoy’s 12 wall sculptures and single floor piece in the main gallery treat art and design as if they’re two sides of the same coin: conventions to be messed with in order to mess with a viewer’s expectations -- not to mention one’s head.

The gallery walls have been covered with standard sheets of whitewashed plywood, leaving the grain visible but softening its contrasts. Hanging at different heights, like the tools in a tinkerer’s workshop or decorations in a mom-and-pop shop, are Sew Hoy’s abstract sculptures.

Each is a platter-size disk of fired clay that Sew Hoy has variously festooned with metal necklaces, discarded electrical cords, headphones, bent lengths of wire, flayed jeans, a T-shirt and a freshly washed bath towel. Many of the glazed and flocked disks have holes punched or poked through them. Odd knobs protrude from others. A few have both features, the stubby protrusions and torn orifices combining with the clay’s ruggedness to suggest animal hides or ceremonial talismans.

Some of the holes recall those in road signs that scofflaws have used for target practice. Others resemble eyes and mouths, suggesting faces or masks. Still others evoke holes in doughnuts or car tires, creating calm pools of emptiness around which Sew Hoy’s brand of taut madness swirls.

The knobs are gnarly, like petrified sweet potatoes or the horns of miniature rhinoceroses. Imagine Yayoi Kusama collaborating with Peter Voulkos, or Lee Bontecou designing a jeweler’s display cases.

Sew Hoy’s floor piece is a more traditional sculpture. But what it lacks in funky inventiveness it makes up for in scale. Shaped like a whirlpool, its serpentine spiral of flocked logs, foam-filled fabric tendrils and malignant lumps of stitched-together stuff pay homage to Bontecou and Louise Bourgeois while struggling to get out from under their shadows.

Unlike a lot of artists working the borders between art and design, Sew Hoy does not stop when the boundaries blur. That’s where her nuanced and surprisingly mature works -- she is still in graduate school, at Bard College in Massachusetts -- start, taking viewers on wild rides through the uncharted territory where form and function collide, commingle, cross-pollinate.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 525-1755, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.karynlovegrovegallery.com

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At least, it seems, the artist had fun

The best thing about Steven LaRose’s abstract paintings and drawings at the Kristi Engle Gallery is that they look as if they were fun to make. Many of the 52 works on paper and panel in “Portraits or Landscapes From the Uncanny Mist” appear to have provided the artist with delightful little surprises as they took shape before his eyes.

These modest pleasures, however, are too slight to sustain long-term viewing. The immediate appeal of LaRose’s images wears thin quickly.

If you’ve ever used the end of your spoon to make drawings from milk spilled at breakfast or, better yet, used a straw to blow small puddles of drinks spilled at lunch, you are familiar with LaRose’s basic technique and the whimsy at the root of his art.

His palette -- predominantly blue, black, gray and brown -- is similarly watery. And the irregular forms that emerge from the atmospheric swirls of acrylic and splashes of ink vaguely recall cellular structures, microscopic organisms, natural phenomena.

The overall impression is that of dabbler in search of diversion -- of noodling around with simple materials to pass time in a relaxing, undemanding manner. Although some of LaRose’s compositions form loose patterns, most appear to be finger-paintings made by someone who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.

Kristi Engle Gallery, 5002 York Blvd., (323) 472-6237, through Dec. 22. Open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.