George Stoll’s fabulous fakes are the real thing after all

Made from wax, a hand-cast sculpture of a plastic drinking glass by George Stoll is an incredible simulation -- a synthetic cup that isn’t plastic; a machine-made form that is not pristine but instead betrays the idiosyncrasy of the hand; and an object whose color, never quite saturated, seems to be leaching out, like a face going pale. Dusty doppelgangers, his vessels look exactly like the real thing, except not quite.

A peculiar new Stoll sculpture at Kim Light Gallery multiplies what could be called “the strangeness of banality” in his earlier art, which in addition to cups has also focused on sponges, toilet paper rolls, soap bars and other familiar domestic items. “Untitled (43 tumblers in a holiday arrangement)” is a virtual village of beeswax and paraffin drinking vessels, each occupying an individual niche in a large wood shelf atop a pedestal.

You don’t see the tumblers, however, unless you walk around to the back of the tall shelf. (It’s just over 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide.) Approached from the front, the back-lighted shelf at first appears blank.

It has a stepped, rectilinear contour that recalls a city skyline. Small holes drilled into its face show tiny colored spots, like a randomly lighted pattern of apartment and office windows in urban buildings crossed with stars in a night sky. The colors turn out to be made by the multicolored tumblers on the other side.

The ensemble is like an eccentric church altarpiece crossed with a reliquary -- an impression enhanced by a second group of works in an adjacent room. Bones and skulls made from gessoed plaster are arrayed on pedestals and embedded into wall niches. Stacked Halloween-pumpkin baskets underscore the elemental paganism that lurks beneath most religious feeling, while bowls overflowing with female breast forms -- dotted with pastel-colored nipples -- provide a disconcerting note of nurturance.

Stoll’s ode to the traditional Baroque theme of vanitas, or the fragile transience of life and death’s inevitability, gets under your skin. The sculptural forms are covered over with gesso, a thick and powdery white liquid traditionally used to prepare wood panels or sculptures for painting. Stoll mostly leaves the paint off, which means the soft, chalky contours of the gesso coating yield a melting, marshmallowy appearance. It’s as if these strange modern relics were disappearing before your eyes.

Kim Light Gallery, 2656 La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-1111, through Jan. 19. Holiday hours to Jan. 6. www.kimlightgallery.com.

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A reintroduction to local history

A group of 13 paintings unseen in 40 years by the late, little-known Pasadena artist John Barbour opens a small but intriguing historical window.

Hard-edge painting, a term coined in 1959 by the influential Los Angeles critic Jules Langsner to describe geometric abstractions by John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin and others, was the first indigenous Modernist art exported from Southern California in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Still far from fully examined, the period style was widely practiced.

At Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Barbour’s paintings show an early debt to McLaughlin, especially in a 1964 “Composition” composed of flatly painted vertical bars colored in grays, cream and blue-green. Slightly off the grid at the top and bottom of the 2-foot-square panel, the impersonally painted color bars create a sense of potentially revelatory space awaiting discovery behind them.

The work also suggests an apparent relationship to the less adventurous but nonetheless stylish abstractions of Lorser Feitelson. Eleven paintings date from about 1966, two years after Barbour, then 75, was included in a large show of Hard-edge related work in Newport Beach at the forerunner to what is now the Orange County Museum of Art.

They use acrylic color and crisp geometry to make spatial ambiguity. A line appears to fold around itself, a shape reads as positive form or negative space, depending on the color-shapes adjacent, and a shift in tone from lighter to darker sends an otherwise two-dimensional shape or line twisting into a third dimension.

A profound painter such as McLaughlin used similar strategies to establish spatial voids paradoxically bursting with visual amplitude. (His was a Modernist version of a traditional Japanese aesthetic.)

More playful and design- oriented, Barbour is not, on the evidence of this modest show, in the same league. But it’s nice to make his art’s acquaintance and to begin filling in some gaps in the historical record.

In the gallery’s back room, some useful context for Barbour’s work is provided in paintings by McLaughlin, June Harwood and Clark Murray.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mon- days. www.cardwelljimmerson .com.

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christopher.knight@latimes .com