Women as ripe symbols of might

The woman sits on a precarious perch, a tower of old, child-size wooden chairs. Her back rounds in a posture of protection or possibly grief. Her hands cup the halves of a split pomegranate. Down her bare knees, its bloodlike juices flow.

“Brood,” the title of this sculpture by Alison Saar, is so potent an image and so dense with metaphoric suggestion that it could constitute her entire show at L.A. Louver and be enough. Instead, it stands among 10 other pieces -- sculptures and works on paper -- many of which also sear into the psyche.

The L.A.-based Saar is one of the most significant sculptors working today, and her shows tend to be serious occasions. She reaches deep into Greek myth, African art and practice, the history and associations of her materials, everyday experience and the stark sculptural tradition of German Expressionism and emerges with work of primal intensity, work that abounds in cultural and historic references but doesn’t depend on them to exert its blunt, visceral power.

“Brood’s” sole figure is cast in fiberglass, though her naked skin looks burnished, like a painted wood surface sanded smooth by time and wear. As in most of Saar’s figures, her eyes are not articulated. Her attention seems directed inward. A breathtaking icon of maternal fertility and loss, she holds something broken and yet filled with potential. The pomegranate in her hands and the other gnarled fruits clustered at the foot of the tower of chairs are rendered in bronze. Their tough hides protect a juicy womb of promise.

Nourishment and fertility factor heavily in these works. Seeds, roots, milk and blood all come into play, with woman as a generative force throughout. In “Bareroot,” a female figure with her knees pulled to her chest lies on her side on the floor. Her feet transmute into a loose weave of long, meandering roots. The roots imply a sense of connectedness to the earth, but they are also bared, as if the figure had been pulled from her native soil.

In “Sea of Nectar,” roots double as branching streams of milk coming from a standing figure’s breasts. Like the figure in “Bareroot,” this one is life-size and clad in patches of ceiling tin. Geometric patterns stamped in the tin create an all-over effect similar to scarification. Tar rubbed into the surfaces yields a rich, dark patina.

Small copper moths coated with gesso and pale greenish paint cling to the skin of the standing figure in “Hither,” the show’s title piece. The figure cups her hands around her open mouth as if to issue a call; the moths are, perhaps, the response. One rests on her tongue. The rest attach themselves to the dark body as if it were a flame, and dozens more swarm across the gallery walls.

Other works in the show make reference to the lunar cycle, as well as to the mythic origin of the seasons. Cyclical nature, gravitational pulls, periods of fertility and dormancy -- all have deep associations with women, both positive and negative, as Saar suggests in “Lunaseas,” the punning title of a series of wall-mounted sculptures.

Saar’s forms register immediately in the body as well as the soul. For all their wondrous physicality, they are elegantly poetic; for all their knowing eloquence, they endow silence with presence.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Saturday. www .lalouver.com.

--

Low-tech tales from the past

Dust mining. The curiousness of that word pairing, its absurdity, acts as the foundation from which Ethan Murrow’s recent work springs. Doomed obsessives are his favorite character types, and futility drives all his narratives, including the latest, which is played out in deftly executed drawings and an amusing short film at Obsolete.

In his work of the last few years, the New York-based Murrow has constructed elaborate fictions, then investigated them with a disarming earnestness. His method shares much with that of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology and, especially, the photographic team of Kahn and Selesnick. Murrow positions his tales in the nonspecific past, arming his protagonists with low-tech tools and contraptions and setting the stories in remote, isolated locales exempt from technological advancement.

Yet within Murrow’s work there is a faint, ominous whiff of a desperate, postapocalyptic future. Where, in our civilization’s timeline, would particles of dust be hunted and valued except in a world exhausted of its other resources?

The seven-minute film, “Dust” (made in collaboration with Vita Weinstein-Murrow and director Baker Smith), chronicles a day in the life of the miners, from their early-morning trudge to a pit-pocked plain through the cashing-in of their dusty vials to their return to camp, agitated, festive and violent. Murrow’s huge pencil drawings resemble stills from the film and, except for some silly memorial portraits of goats, vividly describe the miners and their environment.

Murrow adopts visual idioms from the past that give the work a vaguely convincing air of documentation. The film is shot in sepia tones and has a tongue-in-cheek but probingly moralistic voice-over. The drawings have the look of careful, faithful, old-fashioned illustration. Some call to mind early Soviet propaganda heroizing the noble worker.

Murrow often stands in as that determined worker, inviting a metaphoric interpretation likening the artist’s enterprise to the zealous miners’, “tweezing up minutiae in the air,” as the voice-over puts it, in an effort to extract something of value, something enduring. With this visually and conceptually engaging body of work, Murrow succeeds smartly.

Obsolete, 222 Main St., Venice, (310) 399-0024, through April 27. Open daily. www.obsoleteinc.com.

--

Broken words evoke power

If Marc Handelman’s new paintings could be heard, they’d sound like opera sung through a bullhorn. They’re grandiose and shot through with the insistence of institutional branding.

Handelman paints the logo of the defense contractor Northrop Grumman (sturdy block letters in an italicized slant) on canvases of various widths but all the same height, 69 inches. They are hung, less than a foot off the floor, in a nearly continuous band around the Marc Selwyn gallery, so they read as a single, enveloping installation more than as individual paintings.

The effect is carefully orchestrated to feel powerful but slightly destabilizing. The names are painted in reverse, so they run counterclockwise around the room. They are fragmented, interrupted by panels painted like gorgeous faux marble. When read in their entirety, they still feel fragmented because Handelman has painted them in sections with different schemes: blurred in brooding dark violet, in luminous relief against emerald streaks, in murky industrial brown against gray and black diagonal stripes.

Handelman’s palette is rich and intense, and his textures are equally slick and seductive. The most affecting aspect of his show is the sense of unease conjured by the alignment of beauty and corporate/military might. But for all of the installation’s heft and bravado, its overall effect feels slight. Handelman’s voice is loud and clear, but he’s not as articulate as he is voluble.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, (323) 933-9911, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com.

--

Elusive themes in metaphors

Before the art market developed a voracious appetite for the lead-free cultural exports of China, it hungered for hard-won output from politically insular, aesthetically sophisticated Cuba. Just a decade ago, Cuban artists were the darlings of the art world and the focus of countless museum and gallery exhibitions. Although they are no longer the flavor of the moment, they may become so again if new leadership in our country and theirs betters the conditions of access and exchange.

The Couturier Gallery has consistently championed Cuban artists, including Carlos Estevez, now featured in his fifth solo show there. Estevez’s visual vocabulary draws from charts and diagrams, early 20th century French artist Francis Picabia and his own, slightly older Cuban colleague, Jose Bedia, who, like Estevez, now lives in Miami. He draws and paints with an ideographic clarity delightfully out of sync with the elusive nature of his themes: a sense of place and belonging; secrets, imaginings, dreams and other concealed workings of the mind.

In one of his paintings, the human heart doubles as an island with a walled city within and a bevy of boats nuzzling its shore. In a crisply delineated, wonderfully wry drawing, two figures converse on old-fashioned telephones that constitute their bodies: They are, literally, mobile phones.

Estevez’s style can feel repetitive at times, but when he’s pursuing an acute concept, and especially when he’s working in pencil and watercolor, his imagery is rich in metaphor and graced with humor.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 933-5557, through April 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.couturier gallery.com.