Strange, playful energy

Mindy Shapero has become known in recent years for loading her works with long and feverishly didactic titles aimed at cuing viewers in to the esoteric code underlying her seemingly nonrepresentational sculptures and paintings.

The strategy points to a curious struggle at play in the work between mysticism and formalism or, put another way, between the artist’s conceptual will and the almost rebellious integrity of her works as objects.

Speaking in Art in America a year after appearing in the Hammer Museum’s much-lauded 2005 show “Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles,” she distanced herself from the show’s central conceit, insisting that her work was “not about thingness . . . not object-oriented” but driven, rather, by the narratives outlined in those inscriptions.

Those who’ve written about the work have been largely unconvinced, however, praising Shapero’s formal acumen while dismissing the titles with some mixture of bemusement and irritation. Jerry Saltz concluded an otherwise enthusiastic review in the Village Voice in 2006 with “All she has to do is get more ambitious and stop trying to lead us around with her titles.”

That’s just what she appears to have done with “Into the Bottomless Pit,” her third solo show at the Anna Helwing Gallery. The checklist has dwindled to a basic index of materials and dimensions, with the few one- or two-word titles serving a purely designative function: “Traveling Eye,” “Looping” or the almost dejectedly factual “Head.”

The works, meanwhile, seem to have grown bigger -- if not literally, then in their energetic command of the room. The show’s four free-standing sculptures are strange and wonderful things, buoyantly playful and adroitly engineered, as giddy as they are confident.

Throughout, we see Shapero instinctively testing shapes against one other, balancing delicacy with monumentality, stability with imbalance, centripetal cohesion with explosive propulsion.

The works are filled with clever inversions, most of them exhaustingly labor-intensive. Slender loops of striped fiberglass (hence the title, “Looping”) spring from a low, stable black base like ribbons set to flutter in the wind. Hollow rounded pyramids gathered in a compact cluster shoot outward like shafts of quartz crystal, their outsides glittering with gold leaf, while simultaneously collapsing inward, with slender internal stripes leading the eye into the core of each.

“Head” is an egg-shaped sphere, 6 feet tall and 5 feet across, with a face fashioned on four sides. From a distance, it appears as black and dense as a lump of coal, but it turns out to be covered in a sort of fur made from thousands of shards of colored paper, each painted black on both sides and cut to about the size of a fingernail. The color peeks through only along each cut edge.

Surrounding the sculptures are four monumental works on paper, resembling photograms but made with spray paint rather than light. In each, Shapero applied the paint over piles of what looks to have been costume jewelry, leaving a phantom imprint of beads, chains, buttons and charms that she then worked over with intricate daubs of acrylic paint and silver leaf. The forms that result -- composed primarily in black, white, silver and hot pink -- suggest magical insects or swirling clouds of particulate matter.

It would not be much of a stretch to believe that these works are symbolic artifacts from some fantastical narrative, but they’re hardly lacking without lengthy inscriptions saying so. Indeed, it’s a testament to the power of the brilliantly crafted objects that they probably speak more clearly without explanation.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 202-2213, through April 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.annahelwing.com.

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Sci-fi meets hip-hop culture

“Thinking Cap,” one of two sculptures in Robert Pruitt’s “Two Tears in a Bucket: Considering the Alcubierre Metric” at the Mary Goldman Gallery, consists of a black Malcolm X cap that appears to hover an inch or two above its pedestal, glowing from within with mysterious blue light. Like most of the works in the show, it is simple but memorable, seamlessly conflating multiple associations -- namely, black power and science fiction, but also hip-hop, custom car culture, street fashion and consumerism’s rabid appropriation of all these things.

This and the other works stem, according to the gallery’s press release, from an early fascination with science fiction that led the Houston-based artist, as a child, “to the frightening conclusion that there were no black people in the future other than the few portrayed as evil or criminal.” (The title refers to a speculative mathematical concept for faster-than-light space travel -- “warp drive” in “Star Trek” terms.)

The show is an unaffected, if occasionally tongue-in-cheek, effort to redress that inequity.

Most of the works are life-sized drawings on brown butcher paper, each depicting a single black figure presented in the manner of an everyday superhero, with popular, traditional and sci-fi accouterments wound so closely together as to be virtually indistinguishable.

“East Texas Marvel,” for instance, shows a woman in a block print cape with a ‘60s-era mini-dress and go-go boots.

Another drawing, “Rage Against the Machine,” portrays a woman in what could be 19th century garb, contemporary tennis shoes peeking out beneath her skirts, calmly wielding a sledgehammer.

For all Pruitt’s play with signs and symbols, the strength of the work is actually its subtlety. This is sign-play driven not by the anxiety of Postmodernism, as similar work might have been a decade ago, but by the hybridizing instincts of hip-hop culture, which gives these drawings room to be not only racial critiques but also sincere and stately portraits whose presence in the gallery is a force in itself.

Mary Goldman Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 617-8217, through April 19. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.marygold man.com.

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Immersed in an artist’s vision

In “Rally,” Cynthia Ona Innis’ second solo show at the Walter Maciel Gallery, the Oakland-based painter continues her exploration of a lush imaginative landscape with ever subtler and more exquisite results. These are paintings one doesn’t look at so much as immerse oneself in, following the artist’s lead through their exotic atmosphere.

The forms suggest biological sources -- aquatic vistas or the microscopic realm of the human body -- but the comparisons are provisional: This is a world generated by the artist’s absolute absorption in her materials, the drama deriving purely from pictorial circumstances.

Mesh pods hover languidly, swaying in currents of blue, lavender and pink, or else shoot across the canvas with predatory propulsion, trailing clouds of black, rust red or brown, while lozenge-shaped fragments of cut fabric (largely satin and fake fur) gather in loose clouds. The pigment is thin and watery in some places, saturating the ground (whether canvas or stretched satin) and blurring sensually into other shades.

Elsewhere, it falls in gauzy and translucent veils or floats on the surface in distinct strokes and lines.

Also included in the show are about half a dozen sculptures involving tight clusters of stuffed satin pods wound with ribbons, cords, rubber bands and other willowy materials.

These works are a natural departure and not without promise, but the objects themselves lag conspicuously behind the paintings, which reached this point of subtlety and sophistication, it’s clear, only after many years of dedicated inquiry.

Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 839-1840, through May 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.waltermacielgallery .com.-- Historical objects made modern

Aaron Smith established himself a little over a decade ago with a lush, brooding, highly virtuosic brand of realism reminiscent of 17th century religious painting, casting contemporary figures in enigmatic saint-like roles in shadowy allegorical landscapes. The paintings were luxuriantly glossy and seductive, built from the smooth application of countless layers.

He’s made a radical shift in recent years, judging from “Estofada,” his third solo show at Koplin del Rio. Indeed, he’s more or less flipped the equation, trading contemporary figures in historical guise for historical artifacts -- sculptures and decorative objects from the Gothic and Baroque periods -- rendered in a contemporary (or at least modern) manner. He removes his subjects from any context and floats them at odd angles across the compositions, leaving wide swaths of negative space. The tones in this case are cool and airy, the pigment thick and full-bodied, almost chunky.

It’s a gutsy move, and all the more admirable because it doesn’t always work. Several figures have an awkward, twisted look, as if Smith couldn’t get the dimensions down, and some compositions feel stilted and self-conscious, or hastily concocted and unfinished.

When they do spark, however, the results are quite gratifying: a nude cherub on a pedestal suspended against a field of gray; a glass case filled with stray decorative objects, the light transforming the space into a delicious melange of white, lavender and pale blue.

The accomplishment of the earlier work leaves one with little doubt of Smith’s potential for success in this vein, once he gets the kinks worked out.

Koplin del Rio Gallery, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-9055, through April 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.koplindelrio.com.