AROUND THE GALLERIES

In all of American history, nothing has been more politically radical than the late 18th century ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and their cohorts. Authors of the first great liberal documents -- “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man,” the Declaration of Independence -- they saw their intellectual propositions, both brilliant and flawed, ignite social revolutions.

Starting around 2002, Sam Durant began making a provocative series of works that ruminate about seemingly radical political ideas that have in fact been institutionalized. His drawings, lighted signs and installations also participate in the process, shaking up the sediment and valorizing the result. Four recent drawings and five large-scale light boxes at Blum & Poe make up a powerful ensemble.

The graphite drawings replicate and enlarge newspaper photographs of civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, two in the U.S. and two in Australia. (Durant was invited to participate in the 2008 Sydney Biennale.) One shows a rally before a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and another Australian aborigines protesting bicentennial celebrations; both record ongoing struggles for equality, centuries after the two nations’ establishment.

Durant’s drawings, probably made by copying projected images, insist on an inherently political dimension in appropriation art. Appropriation -- taking over an existing image -- is itself a once-radical, now thoroughly commonplace art form. Durant’s replicated photographs return appropriation to its modern source in the newspaper clippings smuggled into Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque. Surprisingly, in their new situation Durant’s images possess a ruminative quality -- perhaps as a simple function of having been transformed from the timely urgency of photojournalism into the slow, deliberative process of drawing by hand.

What each of the four drawn photographs has in common is the prominent inclusion of a handmade protest sign, held by a person or, in one case, taped to a police barricade. The signs are oriented parallel to the picture plane. It’s as if their hand-rendering has leaked out into Durant’s pencil drawing, irradiating art’s often overlooked status as another kind of sign.

For theorist Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum takes precedence over the original. In Durant’s work, it’s more like the passing of a torch. The trick is to keep the flame alive.

The flame gets passed on one more time in the next room, which is ringed with large, brightly illuminated signs. Solid color vinyl sheets in red, blue, yellow, white and green, with all the lettering in black, are lighted from behind by fluorescent tubes. The largest -- 8 feet high and nearly 9 1/2 feet wide -- replicates an aborigine sign that says “200 years of white lies.” (It’s a perfect double entendre.) The smallest -- about 5 feet by 7 feet -- comes from the Selma police barricade: “This is freedom?”

The light boxes replicate the handmade protest signs as large, imposing, even somewhat aggressive signage that is inescapably commercial in bearing. It’s as if the vivid street language of dissent has been absorbed into the language of the mini-mall as much as it has been into the art gallery. Collective social action, which is what the original protests were about, is shaken by its new context.

“200 years of white lies” takes on a different meaning when rendered in a commercial guise, coming across as a sly joke on the familiar deceptions of advertising. Suddenly, Durant’s slogans italicize an economic matrix. Racism has a familiar personal dimension, reflected in the faces of Durant’s hand-rendered drawings. But it has always been powered by a less visible economic engine, whether the colonial suppression of indigenous populations or the exploitation of slaves. Durant’s lighted signs illuminate that often obscured dimension.

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Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com

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The faces around the coffee shop

A young woman sitting in a coffee shop stares idly at the stream of artificial sweetener pouring into her plastic foam coffee cup. Another gazes at a menu, mirroring the young man opposite who is looking at messages on his flip-phone. Seated at an office desk, a man looks into the screen of his laptop, while the woman seated next to him looks straight at the viewer -- who, of course, is looking back at her.

Nothing of major consequence is happening in any of these painted genre scenes by Dan McCleary. But each is endowed with a cleareyed sense of gravity that recalls the likes of Piero della Francesca, Georges de la Tour and, more recently, David Hockney. Think of them as celebrating the monumentality of the mundane.

Three new paintings and two etchings form McCleary’s lovely, sophisticated show at Carl Berg Gallery, plus a group of 11 small mono-print portraits in the back gallery. The mono-prints suggest the thoughtful complexity of McCleary’s deceptively simple work: As portraits, each face is unique -- a condition functionally replicated in the unique image that a mono-print produces.

The paintings are executed with an even, unblemished light. In each one, the pictorial subject -- such as it is -- is the act of looking. McCleary invites reciprocation from his audience.

A man’s grayish 5 o’clock shadow emerges as a rainbow of pink, violet, ocher, rose, off-white and brown. A foreshortened arm resting on a yellow table top couldn’t physically fit into the available space, but visually it sits comfortably within the composition. Hands, a sugar shaker, drinking cups, a napkin holder and other objects are arranged on a tabletop in an architectonic display of random casualness. Each of the three pictures features another picture (or, in one case, a blackboard) on the rear wall, parallel to the picture plane, framing our perusal of McCleary’s fabricated image.

The gorgeous etchings -- one showing sprigs of acacia in a glass of water, the other sprigs of Queen Anne’s lace -- use the dense blackness of the etched ground, flat in one and hatched in the other, as an inky foil that makes the objects appear illuminated from within. McCleary is careful to replicate the illusion of the stems’ displacement as they pass from air into water. It’s a simple bit of natural legerdemain, but it corresponds to the artist’s own hard-won sense of artistry.

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Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Saturday. www.carlberggallery.com

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A haunting sense of severance

Incorporating painting, sculpture, drawing, printing and video, the installation by Anthony Burdin at Michael Benevento Gallery is a Goth mis en scene that invokes surprising sources as credibly diverse as Bruce Nauman and “The Blair Witch Project.” Burdin, an artist who has cultivated a mythic persona as an enigmatic rock ‘n’ roll misfit, keeps a viewer on his toes by creating experiential moments that leave one wondering: Is he serious?

That an answer is not readily available is a sign of the work’s success.

The gallery’s front window is hung with a light-killing, tie-dyed tarp in dark and gloomy purples, reds and black. A bulky storage container built from plywood virtually fills the main room, leaving just enough wiggle space to get by on one side. The other side is a beckoning trap, which will surely leave even the skinniest immovably wedged between the container and the wall.

Halfway around the container, a pair of padlocked doors is marked with stenciled Roman numerals in dagger-like Gothic typeface, while all the way around a large, ragged mono-print hangs on the wall. Made from pressing a big paper sheet onto the tie-dyed tarp now obscuring the front window like a funeral shroud, it’s covered with slash marks that yield the look of bloody crime-scene evidence.

A small rear gallery is reached by walking over scrape marks on the floor, suggesting something heavy has been dragged across it. A coil of razor wire, plated in 24-karat gold and dangling an empty key chain, adds stylish bling. Projected on an adjacent wall, a relatively brief, hand-held video reminiscent of something left on the cutting-room floor by Paul McCarthy brings us down into a dingy cellar, where a couple of scraggly mannequins are pornographically entwined.

Burdin’s carefully calibrated installation is creepy and claustrophobic, less because of the individual parts than the general mind-set of unknowable confinement it embodies. Titled “Forever Haunt You,” it’s in two parts, with the second half concurrently on view at the gallery’s New York branch. The artist thus ensures that virtually no one will see the entire thing. Burdin’s art is like a lost twin or a severed limb, and as such it feels just right for this dislocated time.

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Michael Benevento Gallery, 7578 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 874-6400, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.beneventolosangeles.com

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Media darlings

of the drug wars

In his cartoonish style, Colombian artist Fernando Botero once painted a picture of slain drug kingpin Pablo Escobar as an obese, rooftop-dancing gangster amid a hail of bullets -- sort of “Fiddler on the Roof” for the degenerate set. He presented the brutal criminal, once listed by Forbes magazine among the world’s richest men, in his pseudo-Robin Hood guise, dangerous yet cuddly. I’ll take Carolyn Castano’s version any day. Her new work at Walter Maciel Gallery shuns easy moralizing for the sheer strangeness of modern media celebrity.

Seven punchy portraits, each 5 by 4 feet, chronicle men and women associated with Colombia’s drug-addled travails. Paired with Escobar is Virginia Vallejo, the television news anchor who, improbably, was also his mistress. Nearby is Laura Zuniga, the Mexican beauty queen who last December lost her crown when she was arrested on an alleged cash-and-weapons-smuggling trip to South America. Rodrigo Echeverry, Ingrid Betancourt, Clara Rojas and others who have flashed across TV screens also make appearances.

Castano renders each one as a two-dimensional line drawing in rudimentary black paint on a blank white ground. Something as mundane as a facial feature -- the curve of a nose or the shape of an eye -- is faithfully rendered. But likeness is swamped by the overwhelming sparkle of glitter-encrusted paint on hair and lips, showers of syncopated geometric patterns in bright, eye-dazzling colors and lush cascades of ornate, stylized flowers.

There’s a visual insanity to the blaring execution of this imagery that meshes perfectly with the craziness of the subjects’ outlandish tabloid stories. A kind of Extreme Celebrity Portraiture, Castano’s gonzo pictures make weird sense of inscrutable lives.

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Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-1840, through May 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.waltermacielgallery.com

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christopher.knight@

latimes.com