Keeping it simple and stark

“What if I could draw a bird that could change the world?”

Kathleen Henderson poses the question in an urgent, childlike scrawl. “In a good way, I mean. In a good way.” The words fan out across the body of a clumsy, angry, turkey-like creature drawn in dense black and blue. “I know this is not that bird,” the text concludes. “I know that.”

If it’s audacious to imagine art having world-changing power, it’s also essential to act as though it does. Art wields whatever power we assign it. Henderson’s recent drawings and sculptures at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery make a devastatingly strong case to assign it more. And then more.

Based in Northern California, Henderson had her first L.A. show at Felsen last spring, and it delivered a resounding punch. The current exhibition feels continuous with the first -- equally tough, discomfiting, creepy and compelling. With 58 works, the show is large in numbers and huge in terms of its emotional push-pull.

Henderson draws in black oil stick on stark white sheets of paper, occasionally augmenting an image with touches of red, blue, sepia or putty, a smudge or a fingerprint. There is no fussiness, no shading, no real background or foreground. She draws with rawness and insistence, channeling Goya on up through Golub. Each drawing feels like a brusque declaration: This situation/condition exists; consider it.

Torture, shooting, dancing and praying take place on these pages, over and over. Desperation and hostility seem to dominate the motivations of the characters within. A state of nakedness prevails -- not necessarily the unclothed kind, though some figures are nude and a few sexually aroused. The nakedness has more to do with blunt honesty, an unapologetic openness about malignant aspects of human behavior -- for instance, the way we find violence entertaining.

One figure pokes himself in the eye with a stick “just for fun,” according to Henderson’s caption-like description on the page. The guy next to him points and smiles. In another drawing, a man hangs upside down from a crude scaffold. One of his captors binds the man’s body with tape.

Henderson’s characters reveal themselves in spite of wearing hoods or masks, or perhaps because of such selective concealment. One of the officers chasing down a pudgy suspect sports a mask with a clown-like nose and exaggerated, cantaloupe-slice smile. His ridiculous expression turns the matter of law and order into a game, at least for the pursuer.

The hoods that so many in the drawings wear reduce their heads to lumpen shapes with simplified features -- holes for eyes and mouth, no nose whatsoever. Individuality is suppressed all around, an optimal condition for dishing out pain.

Henderson’s images resonate with the daily news (think Iraq and Abu Ghraib) but also with ancient myth, especially (she relates in a gallery statement) the story of the satyr, Marsyas. Apollo, god of music, felt threatened by the overconfident Marsyas and challenged him to a competition. After the muses declared Apollo the winner, the god promptly hung Marsyas upside down from a tree and skinned him alive.

Arrogance meets arrogance. Power is abused. Blood is shed. An old plot line plays itself out exhaustively through time.

Suggestions of corruption and complicity thread through Henderson’s work, making nearly every scene evoke some sort of dark gamesmanship. The sculptures, in paper pulp and tar or wax, have the same raw, nervous energy as the drawings, as if they were anxiously fingered into existence. The spindly arms and legs and the provisional-looking surfaces recall Giacometti.

In one wall-mounted piece, a Pan-like figure curls like a question mark over his drum, playing “Music for the End of the World.” Another, mouth agape, turns his head slightly to one side and holds out his lower limbs in a desperate bargain: “Here, Take My Legs.”

Henderson’s work is concentrated to the point of near-toxicity. But it’s not the drawings that are damaging, it is the cruelty and opportunism that Henderson bears witness to. Next to a simple, sober portrait, she writes in schoolgirl cursive, “I will never be able to draw Benito Mussolini the way he should be drawn.” It’s not a statement about her rendering skills. It’s Henderson again telling us how inadequate art is to capturing truth, but showing us otherwise.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.rosamundfelsen.com

Pleasant look at unlikely hybrids

Chema Madoz’s first L.A. show, at the Duncan Miller Gallery, is a simple pleasure. The Spanish photographer is first of all a sculptor, manipulating objects into clever visual puns and double-entendres that he then records straightforwardly, in black and white.

Substituting one familiar material for another, he flirts with the surreal, impossible and contradictory. He depicts a pipe whose stem has fingering holes like a musical instrument, evoking Magritte’s famous “Treachery of Images” -- “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It is and it isn’t, like the rest of the amusing contrivances: a rose with fish hooks for thorns, a bird cage built of barbed wire, a shopping bag with a strand of pearls as handle.

Madoz does with inanimate objects what his compatriot Joan Fontcuberta did in the 1980s with flora and fauna, creating marvelous, sometimes ominous hybrids that exist only in convincing photographs. Madoz’s efforts are a bit slighter, whimsical one-liners that play with the relationships among an object’s nature, function and appearance.

The substitution of a burnt wooden match for the slender mercury bulb of a thermometer is a smart, concise twist. Using a switchblade as the accent mark on letters spelling the familiar “tu” is similarly devious. Adopting the coolly elegant format of advertising photography, Madoz makes even the unlikeliest of conceits an easy sell.

Duncan Miller Gallery, 10959 Venice Blvd., (310) 838-2440, through Jan. 17. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.duncanmillergallery.

Modern mixes with pioneering

“The View,” like its television namesake, stages a dialogue among women. A fine, modestly scaled group show at Steve Turner Contemporary, it presents work by four contemporary L.A. artists “in concert” with a selection of drawings and paintings from the 1930s by the pioneering modernist Henrietta Shore.

Shore’s drawing of a pair of leafless cypress trees renders them engaged in some sort of muscular ballet. Her colored pencil interpretation of the cliffs of Point Lobos swells with eroticism. If the work brings to mind the sensuous natural forms of Edward Weston, it is not because Shore was derivative but rather because she was a key influence on the far better-known photographer.

The contemporary artists in the show resonate variably with Shore’s aesthetic of distilled form and organic rhythm, her fusion of representation and abstraction.

Like the tree trunks and rocks in Shore’s work, Ellen Birrell’s photographs of the quirky, gnarled shapes of deformed lemons invite bodily associations. Pearl C. Hsiung’s landscapes veer toward the synthetic, garish and frivolous.

Megan Williams’ installation of a dozen canvases in a gallery corner looks like a scattering of body parts -- mossy, messy, fleshy, a cartoonish, exuberant approach to the isolated natural form.

The artist most akin to Shore in terms of elegance is Tia Pulitzer, whose two lovely, petite ceramic sculptures of slightly distorted deer, one finished with an automotive paint shimmer and the other with a transfixing white gold luster, make easy bedfellows of the beautiful, innocent and strange.

Steve Turner Contemporary, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 931-3721, through Dec. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.

The self as the main event

Ed Templeton is a force to be reckoned with, even if his work is not particularly original or wise or consistently engaging. When he packs a gallery with hundreds of individually framed paintings, drawings and photographs, as he has done several times now at Roberts & Tilton, the whole exudes an energy -- at once extroverted and introspective -- that itself is impressive.

Templeton is a professional skateboarder in his mid-30s who lives in Orange County and has been showing his art nearly as long as he’s been earning concussions (nine at last count). Secure in his street-cred as a skater, he seems all too vulnerable as an artist. An air of neediness hangs over the show, preventing him from working through his copious influences (Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, the whole “Beautiful Losers” crowd, Jim Goldberg, Allen Ginsberg, etc., etc.) to reach the particularities of his own vision.

The self isn’t just a subtext to a Templeton show, it’s the main event. His photographs and paintings -- and sculptures too -- chronicle his life and travels and, to borrow the title of a self-portrait and the exhibition as a whole, map his “inner war.” Bits of gossip, protestations of loyalty, pithy and pretentious observations, manifestations of love, records of bruises, and rants about politics and religion spill together with all the confessional depth of a Facebook page.

Templeton’s tone vacillates between wide-eyed wonder and weary worldliness. It can get cloying even as the sheer force of his efforts sucks you in. If only he took as many risks with his art as he does on his board.

Roberts & Tilton, 5801 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 549-0223, through Saturday. www.robertsandtilton.com

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