They will get your attention

Brian Mains’ show at Hunsaker/Schlesinger is one of the most complicated of the new season in terms of its odd, difficult beauty and the complex responses the work evokes. Mains’ paintings feel old-fashioned in some ways, timeless in others. They fuse power and cliché, tradition and raw emotion. By turns symbolic and illustrative, the work veers from one extreme to another, from absoluteness and rigor to corniness and kitsch.

Mains borrows from Christian iconography and Buddhist symbology the way a plethora of his peers recycle pop culture references and conceptual in-jokes. His concerns have to do with purification, renewal, change, transformation. Death and rebirth factor heavily in his visual vocabulary, as does circular imagery connoting the cyclical pattern of being.

The images make a visceral claim on our attention but often exploit that intensity through heavy-handedness. The “Lamentation Triptych,” at nearly 13 feet wide, encapsulates both the strengths and weaknesses of the artist’s work.

The side panels echo the expulsion theme. Man, on the left, and woman, on the right, face toward the center. Nude but for white cloths concealing their faces, they stand in a bucolic, modified Eden, entwined by the thick, snaking roots of a tree. The center panel swarms with pallid, decaying bodies tightly packed into a grotesque nest interlaced with a dark vine or cord. The hammer blow of this center image cancels out whatever delicacy Mains sustains in the side panels, making the whole both uneasy and unconvincing.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the painting “Cleansing the Invisible Man” is as stark and resonant as a single booming drumbeat. In the center of the large canvas stands an unclothed man with his head down and arms out in a gesture of self-offering. His hands catch a curtain of glossy, tar-black rain that falls over him, paradoxically leaving his skin a pale gray while thickening the inky space around him. It’s a startling image, universal in its evocation of bestowed grace, yet laced, whether intentionally or not, with discomfiting suggestions of a kind of racial cleansing.

The drawings and paintings in the show span 12 years. In terms of influence, they reach back to the unidealizing realism of the Northern Renaissance and stretch it into the present.

Other contemporary artists have successfully invoked religious themes -- Robert Gober and Kiki Smith come to mind -- but Mains’ work has an unabashed literality that sets it apart, not always for the better. His painting “The Fall, or The Time it Takes Falling Bodies to Light” is filmic in its sensationalism. Limbs tangle in the darkness and mouths gape as flesh succumbs to flame.

Perhaps because of the theatricality and amplitude of his subject matter, Mains’ work can feel stagy and operatic when it’s on a large scale. Some of the same imagery has a more compressed, affecting power in the smaller dimensions of his drawings in pastel, pencil and graphite. “Bound Figure” has an elemental immediacy. The nude figure tightens himself almost into a ball, seeking to occupy the smallest space possible. A network of ropes, staked to the ground, crosses his back and holds him fast, a searing emblem of all varieties of bondage -- spiritual, emotional, physical.

Mains, who lives in Monrovia, is technically skilled and undeniably ambitious. When his work falters, it’s not because of any ambivalence in style or approach but from overreaching, squeezing the extremes of agony and sublimity too hard, for every drop of juice they can deliver. His work is never less than interesting, and Mains never less than earnest.

Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.hunsakerschlesinger.com

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Venturing to the edge of chaos

Charlene Liu’s beautiful new works at Taylor De Cordoba are shot through with unease, ambiguity and the faintest whisper of danger. The show is the first in L.A. for the artist, who divides her time between New York and Eugene, Ore., but aspects of her style bring to mind others more familiar locally: Violet Hopkins and her camouflage watercolors and especially Kelly McLane and her mix of the bucolic and apocalyptic.

Liu revels in fluidity and flux. Her technique incorporates painterly washes and finely drawn line, collaged marbled papers and oil paint that appears to be printed rather than brushed on the page. Her imagery oscillates between recognizable (plants, rocks, animals, human limbs) and a dreamlike tempest of color, motion and change. Lyricism borders on chaos but never quite crosses over.

The most compelling pieces are those in which Liu flirts most daringly with that edge. In “Bramble Drift,” soft, spiny, spore-like forms tumble across a vaguely aquatic teal and pale mint landscape. In the background, like a faded but troubling memory, stand posts askew and a structure in ruins.

The gorgeous “Flying Guillotine” has nearly manic ebullience, all the more impressive because the image features no blades, no weapons, merely a pomegranate branch laden with fruit. In a centrifugal burst of gold, brick, blood and charcoal, the pomegranates spill their seeds and Liu demonstrates how much energy can be pumped from the simplest subjects and the vaguest suggestions.

Taylor De Cordoba, 2660 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-9156, through Oct. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.taylordecordoba.com

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Turning mundane into absurdity

The dominant themes of Koo Sung Soo’s work -- consumerism, artifice and escapism -- are common to much large-scale color photography today, as is the crisp directness of his approach, a nearly uninflected neutrality. That the themes and style are prevalent does not mean they are exhausted, however, and the freshness of Koo’s work affirms it.

The Korean artist’s show at Sarah Lee, his first in the U.S., includes 10 photographs from his most recent series, “Magical Reality.” The conflation of wondrous and banal pervades every picture. “Tour Bus” is a matter-of-fact shot down the aisle of an ordinary bus turned kitschy through over-decoration. Patterned royal blue seat covers and matching curtains steep the space in treacly blue light.

“Street Peddler” is the outdoor, Korean equivalent of Andreas Gursky’s 99-cent store photograph, an icon of cheap abundance. Koo’s picture is edge-to-edge merchandise -- knives and vitamins, feng shui compasses and hip flasks, lotions and potions -- all in a dense corner stack of red, gold, orange and white made shimmery and reflective through the generous use of cellophane wrapping.

Koo focuses on everyday extremities, urges to excess. His “Wedding Hall,” with its faux crystal and schmaltzy ceiling cherubs, would seem more at home in Vegas than in Seoul.

“Karaoke Room” is a neatly equipped domestic shrine to unrecognizable talent. The room bears trompe l’oeil murals of ancient Egyptian temples and pyramids. Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

Koo has been photographing the urban environment -- classrooms, laboratories, factories -- for the last five years or so, but in black and white. His turn to color is anything but gratuitous. He uses chromatic intensity and saturation as deftly as a Fauve painter, to recast the mundane as absurd, bizarre and a mirror of our most garish dreams.

Sarah Lee Artworks & Projects, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 829-4938, through Nov. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sarahleeartworks.com

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A tension from innocence lost

The tension in Pipo Nguyen-duy’s photographs is a subtle thing. Battle armor doesn’t clang and clash; storm clouds don’t erupt with violent force. Instead, the pictures exude a stability that seems to be eroding from the inside out.

In the dozen stirring images at the Sam Lee Gallery, Pipo creates a strong sense of place only to use it as a setting for small dramas of displacement. Within the expansive beauty of the North American landscape, he conveys the predicament of feeling adrift -- without tools, means or direction.

Members of a marching band, bedecked in red and white, pause solemnly beside a creek, leaning against tree trunks or sitting on fallen logs. The leafless forest behind them seems miles from any parade. In another picture, a stuffed recliner settles surreally into the shallow waters of a pond. “Nomad” features a young man standing resignedly in a murky stream, a suitcase half-immersed nearby, luminous woods spreading around him in unacknowledged splendor.

Pipo’s pictures read as allegorical tableaux, slightly stilted scenes orchestrated to emblematize a particular condition. The Vietnamese-born photographer, a refugee at 13 and now a professor at Oberlin College, started this “East of Eden” series in the summer after Sept. 11, 2001.

Even when showing camouflaged snipers skulking in the woods and fencers oddly rehearsing in a snowy clearing, his compositions are keyed to loss and trauma. What have been lost in the making of this new “landscape of anxiety,” as the artist calls it, are innocence, purity, an abiding sense of security, the same things he lost as a child living through the Vietnam War. This nation’s surfaces still appear intact -- and in the case of the natural landscape, awesome even -- but its soul is most definitely in trouble.

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 190, (323) 227-0275, through Oct. 20. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.samleegallery.com