Earth’s patterns are seen

About three years ago, Takako Yamaguchi started to strip down to basics. Her compositions became simpler, more reductive. The ornately layered and interlocked motifs of her paintings began to separate and stand freely. It is as if she dialed down from orchestral extravagance to the refined purity of a chamber quartet.

Eight recent paintings at Cardwell Jimmerson exemplify the change. They are among the L.A. painter’s best work -- as richly referential as ever, exquisitely precise, stunningly beautiful.

The two newest paintings, from 2008, are also the largest, at more than 5 feet by 6 feet, and the most absorbing. Like all the work on view, they are straight-on landscapes with clearly articulated horizons. Above the line, extraordinary skies of stylized clouds and below, receding patterns of waves or hills.

In “Add This to Rhetoric,” the sky reads as a magnified weave of blue and white, and the sea as tightly aligned rows of pointed peaks. As the waves recede, they flatten out, diminishing from exclamations to murmurs and lightening from dark teal to soft, pale greenish-gold. Three crisp stripes of slate, Prussian blue and bronze leaf divide upper from lower realms. Self-conscious, smart and unabashedly gorgeous, the painting could be a poster child for the decades-old campaign to give pattern and decoration a good name.

Yamaguchi’s swirling seas and curtained clouds have been likened to the abstracted patterns that invigorate Japanese textile design and screen painting. The affinity is striking, but the artist’s imagery and approach are at least as deeply informed by early 20th century American Modernist painting, from Georgia O’Keeffe through Henrietta Shore, Helen Lundeberg and Agnes Pelton. All painted the landscape with equal parts clarity and wonder, giving hard edges to elusive, sometimes spiritual conditions.

Yamaguchi’s other 2008 painting, “Reunion With Reality,” pays direct homage to the late Chicago painter Roger Brown, particularly his 1974 canvas “Buttermilk Sky.” Yamaguchi’s orderly, hilly brown mounds rest on the ground like candy buttons. Football-sized clouds, in gleaming bronze leaf, shrink down to abbreviated blips at the horizon, then seem to rise again and grow, like the Earth’s own radiant thought bubbles.

Here and elsewhere, Yamaguchi borrows a good deal from Brown in terms of form. Her scalloped clouds echo his quilted skies. Her chain-link clouds go even further, as do her twining strands and serpentine bands of white in the sky.

Her work doesn’t, however, share Brown’s dark sociopolitical undertow. Yamaguchi’s newest paintings celebrate art’s magnificently syncretic history and the ecstatic beauty of the natural world. Expansive as well as reductive, they have a distant kinship with the pulsating visions of Charles Burchfield and his contemporary L.A. offspring, Sharon Ellis.

Yamaguchi is still layering her work, but the complexity is as much temporal as spatial. The images themselves ring with clarity. They distill her earlier work to its luminous essence and embrace, with familial respect and a lifelong learner’s awe, what came before in the work of others.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Nov. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cardwelljimmerson.com.

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Humans not at one with nature

In one of Liza Ryan’s new videos at Griffin, a figure in neutral, form-fitting leggings and hooded top steps in front of a series of projected landscape images and tries to blend in with them, tilting her head and shifting her limbs to become as invisible as possible. Off-screen, the voice of the artist (presumably) barks directions: “Go to the middle.” “Turn around.”

After the desired pose is reached, the figure walks away, casting a large and obviously human shadow across the scenery.

The exercise is only mildly interesting to watch, but it provides a succinct metaphor for the theme Ryan pursues throughout the show: humans’ dual status as part of and yet apart from nature. Our footprint would be smaller and less destructive if we merged seamlessly with our surroundings, but that kind of harmony is fleeting.

In another, two-channel work, a projection of a bird in flight edges another, in black and white, of a woman running across a field, anxiously looking up to the sky as if tracking the bird’s course. The woman appears a bit desperate, and at a certain point both screens give way to fragmented glimpses of the bird’s wings and tail.

An air of futility threads through these works as well as a third video, featuring a black-clad woman perched in a sycamore. In each performative sketch, humans emulate or imitate nature, but their efforts are self-conscious and unfulfilled. Ryan’s enactments picture a kind of gracelessness and themselves lack the lyricism and poetry of her better work.

Griffin, 2902 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6886, through Nov. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.griffinla.com.

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When daily life is seen in panorama

The panorama is among the least still of still photographic formats. Its horizontal sweep suggests breadth of time as well as place. You often can’t see a panorama in its entirety from one spot; you have to move along it, progress through it.

The cinematic storytelling potential of the format is put to good use in Dylan Vitone’s photographs at DNJ Gallery. Vitone, a young photographer teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, creates panoramas up to 8 feet wide (and just 14 1/2 inches high) by digitally combining numerous pictures made from a single spot. The seams don’t call much attention to themselves, so the images typically read as long, continuous, 360-degree views.

Working in the tradition of street photographers and social anthropologists such as Milton Rogovin and Bruce Davidson, Vitone makes extended portraits of communities through intimate observation of their everyday rituals. He has shot extensively in South Boston as well, though nearly all of the pictures here were made in Pittsburgh.

He surveys the scenes at a monster truck rally, a night at the roller rink, a bikini contest. He shoots the multiple narratives that unfurl simultaneously on a hot summer day when an Elmo sprinkler is set in the middle of a residential street. The pictures are dynamic -- rich in texture, detail and character. Vitone favors the natural choreography of the street over arranged poses, and the authenticity is palpable.

A few images mess effectively with the presumed congruency of linear time and linear format, showing the same figures multiple times in the same visually continuous scene. In “Dock Fight,” time folds like an accordion, yielding a wonderfully syncopated image of two young men in various stages of light hand-to-hand combat.

DNJ Gallery, 154 1/2 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 931-1311, through Saturday. www.dnjgallery.net.

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So connected, yet so distant

There’s a bit of Stuart Davis in David Korty’s sprightly new paintings at Michael Kohn, in their jazzy rhythms and self-contained patches of color. Richard Diebenkorn sneaks in there too in the overall flattening of space into clean, architectonic divisions.

Korty’s paintings have their own look, however, a distinctive blend of emotional distance and formal engagement.

That emotional distance is not so much Korty’s style as his subject. The people in his paintings plug into their iPods, talk on cellphones in crowded public places, sit in the holding tanks of airport lounges, send text messages, tap computer keyboards. They are featureless, generic players in mundane environments. Korty takes these flat-lined scenarios and injects them with aesthetic adrenaline, a vibrancy of pattern, color and line, a toothsome texture.

An untitled painting of figures browsing behind a magazine rack buzzes with unexpected energy. The periodicals spread across the shelves like an array of snappy handbills, with each cover a jaunty little geometric or biomorphic abstraction. Korty, who is based in Los Angeles, builds the plane of each painting out of smaller planes of chalky color -- faded red, pale yellow, diluted orange, light coral, washed-out denim and lots of white. Korty outlines some of the sections and then sets his line free to define more amorphous rhythms and reverberations enlivening a scene.

The weave of the underlying linen often shows through, beneath layers of pigment that have been frosted on and blotted off.

In Korty’s hands, the bland everyday takes on a raw, improvisational beauty.

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

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