Di Suvero blends basics, elegance

Mark di Suvero’s rugged steel sculptures combine formal refinement and industrial toughness in abstract compositions that are playful and serious, whimsical and vigorous. This mix of delicacy and bluntness forms the basis of much modern sculpture and has provided about 50 years’ worth of sculptors with ample room to maneuver, each shifting the balance to suit his or her purpose.

But that leeway has never been enough for Di Suvero, whose seven new sculptures and 11 drawings at the L.A. Louver Gallery add such a strong dose of hands-on interactivity that their industrial-strength elegance is blown away by their unapologetic embrace of homegrown corniness.

At a time when corporate professionalism and digital slickness infect all aspects of culture, it’s heartening to see Di Suvero’s stubbornly wonderful sculptures, each of which finds heroic moments in the humble activities of tinkerers -- ordinary folk who cobble together scraps of this and that to enhance their surroundings and get a little bit extra out of life’s ups and downs.

Di Suvero, born in 1933, wastes no time in linking his art to common things. In the main gallery, the first piece you see, “al di la,” is an idiosyncratic, nearly 10-foot-tall gong that spins and tips as you strike it with a pair of rubber hammers, both of which slip into a stainless steel pipe when not in use.

The music you make by drumming on Di Suvero’s symmetrical sculpture is cathartic -- and pretty good exercise if you keep it up long enough. More important, it makes you feel the cut, bent and welded steel in your body, its reverberations traveling through your hands, arms, shoulders and torso. When “al di la” comes to a rest, you know it differently than you did from a distance.

The second piece is “Luck’s Prime,” a hammock made of cantilevered I-beams, aluminum tubing, nylon rope, chunks of rough wood and a thick sheet of rubber. The nearly 14-foot-tall, 20-foot-long contraption screams overkill and goofiness.

To lie back and relax in it is to be pleasantly suspended. At the same time, the mammoth sculpture gives palpable form to the psychologically charged, often radically unbalanced relationship between labor and leisure that defines so much of American life, raising troubling questions about justice, equity and civilization.

In a sunlit upstairs gallery, three tabletop sculptures -- “Roister Doister,” “Retrofit” and “Trinitarian” -- spin like globes or like basketballs on the fingertips of tricksters. Each airy cluster of welded fragments of metal rotates atop a spiky protrusion that emerges from a similarly cut, bent and welded base.

Unlike the simple, almost illustrative big works downstairs, these smaller-scale sculptures flaunt Di Suvero’s trademark touch: his capacity to make positive and negative space dance with grace, panache and a whole lot of funky verve.

His pen-and-ink drawings capture that calligraphic magic in two dimensions. They also emphasize the pictorial nature of Di Suvero’s sculptures, whose silhouettes are fundamental to their overall effect.

In two small side galleries stand the showstopping highlights -- body-scaled sculptures that are physically intimate and emotionally monumental.

Downstairs, “Ring Neste” marries lacy loveliness to come-what-may pragmatism. Upstairs, on a roofless balcony, “M-Axled” is a gorgeous workhorse of an abstract sculpture, its evocations of muscular strength and mental toughness perfectly calibrated, balanced, complementary.

Although Di Suvero is best known for his huge outdoor sculptures (one of which stands nearby on Venice Beach), he may be even better at mid-size works. The two here are masterpieces.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com.

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Taking collages to a dazzling place

Larry Bell takes Light and Space, Southern California’s first internationally recognized art movement, into the Digital Age -- and beyond. At the Frank Lloyd Gallery, 17 abstract images compress seemingly infinite expanses of space into razor-thin planes without being overcrowded or congested or suggestive of any sort of claustrophobic confinement. The effect is eye-opening and mind-blowing, a deliciously hedonistic spin on the old Modernist platitude that less is more.

A lifetime of looking -- and playing with perception -- lies behind Bell’s works on paper, which, strictly speaking, are collages. But Bell, born in 1939, in effect reinvents the art of collage, transforming its humble, cut-and-paste beginnings into a spectacular melt-and-meld process that comes straight out of the Space Age but is still DIY in its roll-up-your-sleeves and see-for-yourself ethos.

From a distance, Bell’s rectangular works on jet black and bright red grounds resemble portals -- doors or windows that interrupt the time-space continuum we call everyday reality. Each opens onto a dazzling, often fabulously beautiful space where several sunrises and sunsets seem to be happening simultaneously, alongside a stunning variety of extreme weather conditions, including dust storms, downpours, fog banks and blinding blizzards.

In close-up, the sharp lines and hard edges that are part and parcel of the way traditional collages are made -- by cutting, ripping and overlapping different sheets -- dissolve into one another. In Bell’s hands, the fragments essential to collage fuse into single, unruptured planes of iridescent colors that shift and shimmer with every twitch of the eye.

To achieve this mesmerizing effect, Bell coats sheets of film, acetate and paper with vaporized metallic particles and then laminates the variously translucent and opaque layers. The heat and the pressure of the table-size device he uses cause the materials to melt and mix, changing their chemical makeup. Mongrel cocktails result, which make a mess of spatial recession and leave viewers standing before unexpectedly breathtaking settings.

Think virtual architecture. Or futuristic Zen gardens. Or deconstructed rainbows, made palpable and permanent. Or two-dimensional riffs on John Chamberlain’s crumpled car-part sculptures. No matter how Bell’s newfangled collages are described, words only hint at the visual richness they deliver.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through March 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.franklloyd .com.

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Murals enhance visions of reality

It’s hard to know what you’re looking at when you visit Christine Nguyen’s exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery. Large, often mural-scale images cover the walls, and each seems to depict an underwater world filled with strange flora, fauna and other mysterious masses of intangible energy. The indescribable critters and shadowy spaces in Nguyen’s vivid pictures are exquisite, as if made from glowing light or liquid electricity. Many are filled with so much realistic detail, you simply assume that they are real creatures in real spaces -- and that Nguyen has used microscopic lenses and digital technology to make otherwise inaccessible worlds visible to humans.

In fact, the young L.A. artist makes photographs the old-fashioned way, with light-sensitive film, chemical baths, hand-operated enlargers and loads of patience for the trial-and-error process. The rest of her method is even more hands-on.

What you see in the gallery are 16-by-20-inch Cibachromes that Nguyen has arranged neatly on big rectangular sheets of thin plastic. Her gridded images begin as drawings, made with various inks, pigments and salt crystals, on translucent sheets of Mylar. She lays three or four sheets atop one another, photographs them, sets them aside and then heads for the darkroom, where she enlarges, crops, and composes, keying up some colors, reversing others and making hundreds of lush, supersaturated prints.

The large works that result recall digital images of deep space, laboratory enlargements of microscopic organisms, and actual-size photographs of seaweed and coral reefs, not to mention X-rays of ligaments, MRIs of neural networks, pictures of fireworks, nighttime warfare, glistening jewels, crystals, minerals and more.

Photography’s hands-off glossiness is essential to Nguyen’s art. Her five medium-size ink and salt crystal drawings lack the mystery of her 10 photographed drawings, which strike just the right balance between laying everything bare and giving nothing away. These intriguing images go far beyond gimmickry to keep you wondering what you are seeing. It’s awesome.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com.

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Energy explodes in tiny paintings

Nine little paintings by David Smith (1906-65) make for a gem of an exhibition at the Margo Leavin Gallery. Shown in December at an art fair in Miami (along with five other paintings), the page-size oils on Masonite from 1956 and 1957 are all about focus.

In each, a great artist at the top of his game sets pretty strict limits for himself -- in terms of size, time, palette and procedure -- to see just how much energy he can wrestle from the restrictions.

No two panels are alike. All are complicated.

Most come out of Picasso’s Cubism and Pollock’s all-over compositions. Smith adds structural or sculptural solidity, turning the Spaniard’s predominantly figurative works into compact monuments to figure-ground ambiguity and the American Abstract Expressionist’s furious swirls of dripped paint into punchy thrusts: forceful stabs that explode upward and outward, often diagonally. Sometimes the laws of gravity take over and the once-stable structures in Smith’s paintings appear to be on the brink of collapse.

All are masterpieces of efficiency. In one, pale orange and serene gray counteract an angular web of ricocheting lines. In another, brushy smears of yellow have been covered with a runny puddle of turpentine-thinned gray. Smith then squeezed black paint straight from the tube, using its open mouth to scrape away the gray and reveal the yellow. The meaty composition resembles a galaxy of shooting stars or a handful of fingertips trying to escape their bodily confines.

The elasticity of paint takes center stage as Smith shows what can be done when it is handled with talent and, even more, focus.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 273-0603, through March 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.