Shrewdly scripted emotions

All the world may be a stage, but Gregory Crewdson’s big color photographs manage to flatten it into a backdrop for an overproduced photo shoot. Like ads for luxury cars, pricey perfumes and exotic getaways, Crewdson’s 19 nearly 5-by-8-foot inkjet prints at the Gagosian Gallery are less concerned with exploring the world they depict than with selling a fantasy about it.

Nothing wrong with that. A compelling illusion can be eye-opening.

Unfortunately, Crewdson’s meticulously manicured images (in editions of six) peddle the fiction that reality is only meaningful when it mimics the movies -- that everyday life matters only when it arranges itself in scenes, settings and stills with which we’re familiar. That takes the unpredictability out of life, not to mention its messy complexities and incompleteness. It also treats viewers as detached, passive onlookers -- dupes whose only pleasures are voyeuristic and creepy and all the worse for being parsimoniously catered to by the artist, who acts like an omnipotent director (or at least a Hollywood version of one).

Nearly all of Crewdson’s elaborately scripted pictures were shot at twilight, with particular attention paid to the encroaching darkness. The exterior shots feature a generic small town, with some focusing on its business district, more on its residential streets and most on the edges of town, where clapboard homes and trailer parks give way to power plants, storage yards and railway bridges. Shadowy woods surround everything, and rivers figure prominently. Off camera, fog machines and spotlights add uppercase, italicized ATMOSPHERE!, insisting that viewers don’t miss the overinflated POETRY!

Half-naked women and one buck-naked couple interrupt the otherwise ordinary scenery. In one print, a nude woman, who appears to be about eight months pregnant, stands like a statue in a garden. Her pink skin glows as if lighted from within, yet no one notices, except you, the lucky viewer, to whom Crewdson force-feeds his vision.

The interior shots are even creepier. Several compel viewers to be window-peekers, to look in on others, all women: a young one with a newborn, a middle-aged one staring into space and an old one with a letter, her weariness overdramatized.

The only time Crewdson invites viewers inside is in “Untitled (The Father).” In the background, a young woman turns her back. In the foreground, an old guy slouches in an old chair, his bathrobe falling open to reveal skin that looks plastic.

If Duane Hanson made a hyper-realistic sculpture of Christopher Walken and Cindy Sherman photographed it, the image’s emotional tenor would be similar to a Crewdson’s: too obsessed with its own manufacture -- its own excessively fetishized Realism -- to get viewers involved or to resonate very long.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through June 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

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Abstract art gets twisted, tangled

At a time when art is increasingly called on to be all things to all people -- entertaining, educational and, above all, a good investment -- James Richards appears to be a throwback to an age when all that mattered was art, when aesthetic questions provided artists with sufficient grist for their peculiar mills.

Yet there’s nothing simple about Richards’ nine new paintings at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, even if each seems backward, out of step, low-tech, lumpy, almost ugly. The L.A. artist’s mid-size works turn abstract painting inside out as they give powerful form to the haywire sublime.

A typical piece by Richards looks as if it has been cobbled together from scraps swept from the floor of a kid’s sugar-fueled summer-camp craft session: tangled strings, twisted pipe cleaners, lengths of yarn and crusty puddles of paint, sometimes applied in straight-from-the-jar strokes and at other times freely mixed, a happy melting pot of liquid rainbows and wet-on-wet eagerness.

The foundation of each untitled painting is a plain rectangular frame, painted some shade of matte gray or dull beige. To its face, Richards has stapled a messy network of string. The madcap patterns, or anarchistic compositions, suggest the paths of drunken hummingbirds or molecules in a microwave left on all night.

Into the spaces among some strings Richards has woven yarn and wrapped brightly colored pipe cleaners -- like a needlepoint addict determined to do his thing, by any means necessary. Into other spaces he has slathered gooey gobs of acrylic, filling the oddly angled shapes with even odder 3-D forms. Sometimes he paints atop these dried scabs of color, adding more figure-ground ambiguity.

Richards’ basic materials give his works surprising range. No two paintings look alike. With shifting rhythms, distinct atmospheres and quirky dynamics, each evokes a rich blend of experiences.

Metaphors mix promiscuously. Different parts of different paintings resemble broken guitar strings, barbed-wire fences, moss-covered phone lines, barnacle-encrusted cables, intergalactic tumbleweeds and the tactile equivalent of computer viruses.

Chaos is ever-present. So is the suggestion that something has gone wrong -- dreadfully, absurdly, comically.

At their heart, Richards’ paintings are optimistic. Holding themselves together with little more than spit and willfulness, they combine good old American ingenuity with Darwinian ferocity to convey the thrills and terrors of our times.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through June 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.shoshanawayne.com

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Murakami’s Pop grows up

Maturity was just about the last thing on my mind after a visit to Takashi Murakami’s hyperactive survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art last fall. Hundreds of thousands of grinning flowers, loads of poop jokes and an abundance of mutant cartoons created a manic atmosphere of super-cute juvenilia, more suited to preschoolers and preteens than to grown-ups.

But maturity comes to mind at Murakami’s bold follow-up exhibition at Blum & Poe, where eight new paintings steer clear of the glazed-over giddiness and uber-consumerism of his saccharine-sweet silliness for something meatier, deeper and more richly seasoned.

Each of the five paintings in the main gallery looks as if it has been run through a trash compactor -- and come out stronger, denser and more vigorous. Styles collide. Pop graphics compete with abstract patterns. Platinum and gold leaf glisten with the solidity of a machined steel sculpture by Donald Judd. Supercharged Benday dots look like Roy Lichtenstein’s early work on steroids. And the smiling, stylized daisies that had become something of a Murakami trademark blossom into riveting centers of energy, like industrial-strength chrysanthemums pumped up with Op verve. Big drips, whiplash calligraphy and crisply outlined splatters -- in a queasy palette of noxious pastels and poisonous tertiary colors -- resemble the offspring of paintings by Ingrid Calame, Gajin Fujita, Bridget Riley and David Reed.

In a second gallery, three massive canvases depict Daruma, the 6th century sage who was the father of Zen Buddhism. Each painting transforms the philosopher’s wrinkled face and bald crown into a mountainous landscape while still capturing a range of expressions, including bemusement, frustration, patience and a sphinx-like deadpan.

Murakami’s Pop is growing up. His imagery is becoming more complicated, layered and conflicted, less pretty, cheerful or goofy. “Superflat,” the style he defined and defended for its adamant, affectless superficiality, takes on depth and volume in his new works, which no longer masquerade as a shameless marketing campaign.

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through June 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com

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Day laborers in a new line of work

It’s not always clear where work ends and pleasure begins. In the United States, the relationship between labor and leisure is both slippery and ambiguous. The Founding Fathers grappled with this dilemma and pretty much left it to individuals to figure out for themselves. For John Sonsini, there’s no better place than this ambiguous zone for an artist to set up shop -- to labor over objects in which an honest day’s work might add up to more than the sum of its parts.

For the last eight years or so, Sonsini has hired day laborers to work as studio models. At first, the young Latinos he picked up on street corners were suspicious of him. As word got around that the 57-year-old painter wasn’t nuts -- or threatening -- getting paid to have one’s portrait painted got to be known as a good gig, less strenuous than hauling bricks or digging ditches, if somewhat boring.

At ACME, Sonsini’s newest batch of paintings embodies the casual intimacy of daily labor. The familiarity and regularity of work suffuses his 12 portraits, which are among the most disarming, sensitive and loving Sonsini has made.

There is nothing presumptuous or untoward about these quietly vivacious paintings. None pries into the private lives of the men depicted. Instead, Sonsini sidesteps such intrusive prodding in favor of getting the job done as efficiently as possible: humbly, respectfully and without fuss over extraneous details.

Narrative is kept to a minimum. In terms of composition, the five small paintings are as straightforward as photo IDs. The seven big ones are life-size, full-length pictures of seated or standing guys, alone, in pairs or in groups of three. Most face the viewer directly, their expressions restrained and expectant, maybe a little uncertain but conveying a willingness to take a chance on a new job.

Sonsini accentuates the curious mix of intimacy and anonymity by toying, ever so felicitously, with perspective and proportion. The hands and feet of the workers are too big. Although this emphasizes that they are manual laborers and recalls Van Gogh’s early paintings of peasants, it also messes with a viewer’s perceptions, subtly warping space to make you unsure of just where you stand.

Sonsini’s men seem to feel much the same. This suggests that each painting is a sort of mirror, an elusive space where work and pleasure meet yet remain distinct.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through May 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.acmelosangeles.com