AROUND THE GALLERIES

Francis Picabia never rose to the level of Picasso, Matisse or even Duchamp. And that’s part of his charm.

Unburdened by the heavy-duty seriousness that accompanies their works, his light-handed art invites viewers into an unsentimentally whimsical world of deft reverie, where lighthearted idylls often lead to unexpected discoveries -- some fun, some haunting and all fresh. It’s easy to feel as if you’re on a first-name basis with Picabia (1879-1953), whose casual urbanity is both gracious and bracing, out of step and up to the minute.

At Patrick Painter Inc.’s Melrose Gallery, 24 paintings and drawings Picabia made mostly from the late 1920s to the early ‘50s provide a thumbnail sketch of his proto-Pop art. To scan the show chronologically is to see fleshy figures dissolve into linear outlines, which sometimes become abstract patterns and at other times become translucent forms.

Picabia stacks these ghostly silhouettes atop one another, like colorful palimpsests, conflicting memories or tough choices. In a nutshell, he streamlines Surrealism by compressing its psychological depths into the snappy graphics of Pop.

Many of his drawings from the 1920s have the tender tentativeness of Warhol’s drawings from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Wispy lines, suggestive stories and mythological eroticism give these page-size studies breathless delicacy.

By the ‘40s, Picabia’s lines got more decisive, less jittery and tenuous. Shading disappeared in favor of stark contrasts. Figures got simplified, often becoming cartoons. And their postures were pushed to extremes, their limbs sometimes forming letter-like emblems or abstract designs.

Picabia’s easel-scale paintings also shifted from a sort of Cezanne-inspired solidity (in which bodily volumes are carefully built up), to overlapped, transparent forms defined by their contours.

But where Picabia’s drawings developed from one style to another, his paintings flipped back and forth between the two. Simplified images of a trio of nude bathers (1937), a cat (1941) and a cancan dancer (1943) are interspersed with such complex, multilayered paintings as “Pa” (1937), “Composition Abstraite” (1938) and “Reve” (1947).

These sneaky knockouts show Picabia at his best, making strangely ravishing masterpieces without fanfare or bombast, but with just the right touch of irreverent wit. It’s his first solo show in Los Angeles and not to be missed.

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Patrick Painter Inc., 7025 Melrose Ave., L.A., (323) 394-5986, through April 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.patrickpainter.com

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A walk through an indoor forest

If you like Griffith Park and Universal CityWalk, you’ll love “The Forest.” The devilishly clever installation by Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey brings the best of both to Machine Project, a small storefront gallery where freethinking fun is business as usual.

The indoor forest begins with innocent fascination. It’s a treat to step out of the midafternoon glare of the busy city street and into the dimly lighted gallery, where truckloads of soil, wood chips and pine needles carpet the floor. Life-size trees encircle you, and crickets chirp in the background.

As your eyes adjust to the lighting, designed by Bill Ballon, and your ears pick up the relaxing rhythms of the soundtrack, recorded by Emily Cummins, it’s clear that McCaffrey and Newey have not created a super-realistic work that is intended to trick you. What they have done recalls the work of the original Surrealists, who went to great lengths to jolt folks out of dull habits in order to reawaken some of life’s wonder and to warn of its precariousness.

Artifice is everywhere apparent. Swatches of burlap stick out of the ground. The tops of partially buried flowerpots are visible. Branches, taken from tree trimmers before getting mulched, protrude from faux trunks at unnatural angles, their ends abruptly cut. And the 1970s mural wallpaper never pretends to be anything more than it is -- a shamelessly fake fantasy. The same goes for the clouds painted on the sky-colored ceiling.

Although some of the concrete tree trunks, fiberglass boulders, synthetic leaves and plastic mushrooms might be movie-set leftovers, the artists steer clear of the seamless illusionism of big-budget productions, in which verisimilitude rules. Imaginative transport, not illusionistic deception, is their goal. Escapism gives way to critical contemplation.

Sitting on a real log or on an artificial boulder along the meandering path that runs through the 15-by-30-foot gallery is not all that different from taking a break along a trail in a National Park. The respite is nice, but it’s neither private nor free of distraction.

McCaffrey and Newey’s installation sets you to thinking of shrinking forests, growing cities, spreading pollution and the rampant packaging of just about everything. Such melancholic musing transforms “The Forest” into a DIY memorial for the natural environment, a contemporary memento mori for a world unspoiled by what we think of as civilization.

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Machine Project, 1200-D N. Alvarado St., Echo Park, (213) 483-8761, through April 24. Open Saturdays and Sundays. Call on weekdays. www.machineproject.com

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Life at and below ground level

Nick Lawrence’s paintings at Angstrom Gallery fall into two groups: small square canvases from 1997 and larger, generally rectangular ones from 2009. This split highlights the differences between the two bodies of work and reveals the core of Lawrence’s art: burrowing into life’s loamy underbelly, where plants, animals and minerals thrive and die in a cycle ugly and beautiful.

The eight paintings from 1997 are raw and lovely, especially if you have a taste for things excavated, either from archaeological digs or deep, psychological probing.

A vestigial horizon line appears in many of these thickly encrusted works, as do vigorous smears of dirt-brown pigment, washy passages of organic olive greens and pastel-blue skies. Scrawled outlines define rudimentary shapes that often appear to be kids’ drawings of tadpoles, ants and houses. Other shapes dissolve into the primordial soup in which they are stewing.

Lawrence’s 11 paintings from 2009 are less dense, less compacted, less claustrophobic. Their gestures are looser, their colors brighter and their surfaces not as relentlessly worked over.

They seem to have been made more swiftly, with puddles of paint poured on the canvas and allowed to run freely. Lawrence, who also owns and runs art galleries in Provincetown, Mass., and New York City, uses these networks of spidery lines as Rorschach-blot-style stimuli, improvising by adding colors, shapes and bits of collage to form all sorts of imaginary animals and landscapes.

Lawrence’s small, less developed works in the office/entrance reiterate the difference between his early and recent works. The two ink drawings from 1996 are all goo and possibility; the seven pieces from 2009 have the presence of leftovers from natural catastrophes.

Their weathered surfaces lack the magic of Lawrence’s brushwork and the imaginative richness of his wonderfully funky outlook, both of which flourish in his sweetly gnarly paintings.

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Angstrom Gallery, 2622 La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 204-3334, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.angstromgallery.com

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Something in the works’ austerity

Joe Bradley may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or he may be making the most bare-boned paintings around.

At Peres Projects, his extremely lean works give blunt form to the tenor of our times, a fear-laced moment when austerity and desperation seem to have made luxury and confidence not only distasteful but also delusional.

Bradley’s paintings on large and wall-size canvases couldn’t be simpler. Each consists of a handful of unsteady lines drawn in the style of a 5-year-old. They’re easy to dismiss. If you care about color, there’s nothing to look at. The same goes for atmosphere, touch, compositional sophistication, mystery, facility and workmanship.

But some are better than others. “Smiley” depicts a mouthful of perfect teeth. It sticks in the mind’s eye like a song you can’t get out of your head. “Gawd,” “Schuperman,” “Human Form” and “Ecstasy” are also oddly resonant, their barely there efforts suffused with just enough potential for tragic pathos that you ignore them at your own risk.

In contrast, a spiraling line on a round canvas and an asterisk on a square one look unnecessarily decorative.

It’s a fine line that Bradley walks. But he does so with more barbed wit than cynicism.

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Peres Projects, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-6100, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.peresprojects.com

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