AROUND THE GALLERIES

Fifteen years ago, Monique Prieto burst onto the scene with a series of squeaky-clean canvases that changed the way people thought about abstract painting in Los Angeles.

Five years ago, she turned her back on the crisply composed monochrome blobs that had become her signature, ditched acrylics for oils and began painting pictures of phrases borrowed from the nine-volume diary of 17th century Englishman Samuel Pepys, in a style best described as caveman-graffiti.

That stunning shift from hard-edge abstraction to messy image-and-text Conceptualism pales in comparison to the changes that have taken place between Prieto’s earliest word paintings and her new ones at ACME Gallery.

The 13 works in “A Boatfull of Spaniards Singing” are the best canvases Prieto has painted. Richer, subtler and more complex, they are also more wide-ranging, ambitious and psychologically charged than the works she has exhibited since 1994 in 11 consistently terrific L.A. solo shows.

Everything in Prieto’s new paintings is more sophisticated: more seasoned and more sensitive yet less precious, pointed and eager to please. Confidence and sweetness commingle in ways rarely seen in art or in life. This makes for paintings that invite the best from viewers and embody a type of interactive optimism that is anything but naive.

The phrases Prieto picks from Pepys’ down-to-earth diaries are shorter and more open. Most include only two or three words: “Mad in Love,” “Yesterday and Today,” “Humility and Gravity,” “Looking Another Way” and “Repent! Repent!” Even those with more words, such as “Smoke in the Ruins,” “As Much as We Could” and “It Was Done in the Street by Strangers,” are pretty generic, applicable to different situations and evocative of diverse story lines.

Prieto’s palette mostly consists of washed-out colors. Sun-faded passages look as if they have endured extreme temperatures. Turpentine-thinned sections suggest scarce resources, serious frugality and stubborn determination.

Yet supersaturated pinks, blues and golds add electrifying jolts to the overall mellowness of Prieto’s scuffed-up surfaces. This emphasizes that inconsistency is the lifeblood of idiosyncrasy and the heart and soul of these stirring paintings.

The most significant changes to Prieto’s art are compositional. The suggestion of 3-D space enters the picture as never before, as does a sense of swirling, vertiginous movement. Both recall such early 20th century American masters as Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, along with such incompatible influences as Robert Delaunay, Milton Avery, Philip Guston and Pierre Bonnard.

Prieto makes the madcap melange look not just sensible but strangely beautiful, a mix-and-match patchwork that partakes in the make-do adaptability of crazy quilts and the polyglot cacophony of suave cosmopolitanism.

Profoundly generous and deeply satisfying, her new paintings are among the most free-spirited works being made today. Looking at them never gets old. It gets better.

ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through Feb. 7. Closed Sun- days and Mondays. www.acme losangeles.com.

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Wilson rises to the occasion

Richard Wilson’s six new paintings at the Carl Berg Gallery are as close to perfect as anything on Earth can be. Each three-panel acrylic on canvas combines exceptional precision with inexplicable mystery, making for approachable, even friendly works that puzzle the mind, delight the senses and are a joy to behold.

There’s nothing fancy about Wilson’s paintings, which he calls “Rises.” Each consists of three horizontal rectangles abutted to one another so that they form column-like compositions that are roughly the size of doorways.

The tops, middles and bottoms are stretched over bars of various widths, creating panels of different thicknesses. Wilson complements this planar irregularity by positioning each panel slightly off center in relation to its neighbors, aligning his eccentric triptychs in a manner that recalls the ways children stack building blocks: wobbly and never the same way twice.

The face of each panel has been painted a single, indescribably delicious color so warm and saturated that it’s easy to get lost in its simple resplendence. Wilson’s palette is organic, with patiently mixed olive greens ranging from tangy near-yellows to strange almost-grays and rusty reds running the gamut from zippy cinnamon to luscious pumpkin. Loamy browns and midnight blacks betray hints of eggplant and burgundy.

The best stuff happens when your eye glides, jumps and bumps from one colored panel to another. That’s when you see that Wilson is a fantastically talented colorist, a dyed-in-the-wool lover of what is possible with color, the infinite range of its combinations and the density and impact of its physicality.

To complicate things just a bit, he has painted a rectangular patch of color on one side edge of each panel. From head-on, these additions are not visible, and this is the position from which Wilson’s paintings sing. From either side, the patches of color can be seen, and they function like appetizers, preparing you for the visual shifts that take place when you stand face-to-face with the Northern Californian’s quietly fascinating paintings.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931- 6060, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.carlberggallery.com.

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Enveloped by sea and sky

Sush Machida Gaikotsu has emptied his mural-scale paintings of substance, eliminating everything except the contours of frothy waves and the silhouettes of puffy clouds from panels that have been spray-painted shimmering silver, creamy white or velvety black. It’s a rare instance of less-is-more magic, when a strictly limited number of judicious decisions intensifies the effect of the whole. Pop art never looked more scorchingly gorgeous or wickedly Zen.

In two of the Japan-born, Las Vegas-based painter’s five pictures at Western Project, the metallic backgrounds fade to gray or blue, like the skies in Ed Ruscha’s famous paintings of the Hollywood sign. The grounds of the other three are monochromatic, but their colors change as you move around them, the metallic surfaces reflecting and absorbing light so that they sometimes appear to be the lightest of dove grays and at others as dark as dusk, well after sunset.

All of the colors Gaikotsu uses are confined to the serpentine lines that describe the sea’s turbulent surface and the sky’s fluffy clouds. They are doozies and come in a rainbow of sizzling tints, including supercharged fuchsia, dazzling azure, antifreeze green and screaming yellow. Imagine a coloring book in which the black outlines have been replaced with a Day-Glo palette and you’ll have an idea of the fresh, uncluttered vitality of Gaikotsu’s crisp paintings.

The four that cover the four walls of the boxy gallery envelop visitors in a wraparound world of sensual abandon, where water dances and clouds drift to their own dreamy rhythms.

Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.western- project.com.

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Glimpses of the future or past?

Tam Van Tran’s tabletop sculptures and piecemeal wall-relief at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects look like ruins from the future: excavated artifacts from alien civilizations at once primitive and Space Age.

The single wall piece, made of such conventional materials as canvas, paper and paint, as well as such untraditional ones as office staples and spirulina algae, has the presence of a giant, sci-fi moth, a dormant cyborg whose carefully cut, painted and stapled segments appear to have been surgically repaired so many times that its monstrous body seems to consist of nothing but scar tissue.

Tran’s ceramic sculptures are even gnarlier, their cobbled-together structures creating an abundance of nooks and crannies that provides great hiding places for all sorts of surprises: puddles of glistening goo, damaged talismans, ornamental skulls, larvae-like lumps and broken bits of shed skin, shells and husks.

Scale is always ambiguous. Sometimes Tran’s little sculptures resemble miniature dioramas, their fractured forms evoking heaps of scrap metal and piles of detritus inhabited by post-apocalyptic castoffs. At others, they recall crude copies of Baroque tableware: candleholders, ashtrays and serving dishes, all of which could be the offspring of Humpty Dumpty (after his fall) and Italian Futurist sculpture.

Tran puts Rorschach-blot open-endedness to good use, employing it to suggest multilayered stories as dark as they are filled with imaginative possibility.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Feb. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com.

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