AROUND THE GALLERIES

Over the last 15 years, Patrick Wilson has painted some of the most physically resplendent paintings to come out of Los Angeles. His new ones make his old ones look tame, not quite clunky but nowhere nearly as sophisticated as his mind-blowing acrylics on canvas and paper at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Proj- ects. If Wilson were a professional athlete and his game had improved so dramatically, fans would surely think he was juiced.

His paintings perform like champions, rising above the competition to do their own thing with such panache and dazzle that they are at once pleasurable and inspiring. Their extraordinary focus and clamped-down seriousness do not close them off to ordinary folks but instead link them to a wide range of human endeavors, especially to challenges that require dedication, integrity and persistence with no guarantee that such painstaking labors will pay off.

All four galleries have been given over to Wilson’s exhibition, which he has titled “Always for Pleasure.” The structure of all his paintings is similarly straightforward: solid or outlined rectangles of single or slightly modulated colors that are laid atop one another until just the right balance and atmosphere are delivered with bull’s-eye precision.

This basic format leaves Wilson plenty of room to strut his skills as a colorist and to flaunt his capacity to make right-angled geometry look radically individualistic, unexpectedly intuitive and filled with more freewheeling fun than you’d imagine.

No piece is like another. Despite the Minimalist compositions and hard-edged layouts, no part of any painting resembles any other part of it or its partners. Patterns never happen in Wilson’s work. Every square inch has the presence of an adventure, a journey into worlds within worlds where all sorts of discoveries are part and parcel of the experience.

At more than 5 feet by 8 feet, “Tide Pool” is the largest. Its scale recalls the midcentury Modernist architecture for which L.A. is celebrated. Its sensuality matches that made famous by such Light and Space artists as Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Larry Bell. And its accessibility shares much with David Hockney’s Pop paintings of swimming pools in neatly trimmed yards surrounded by shimmering reflections in glass doors.

“Calibration” consists of 11 one-foot square canvases hung in a row on two walls of a separate gallery. The colors run the spectrum, from blistering red to screeching green to glorious purple. They are set off by a similar span of dark-to-light grays and by a dizzying yet sensible mix of complementary colors. Think Josef Albers for the Digital Age, or Verner Panton on acid. If Donald Judd designed rainbows, this is what they might look like.

A group of five paintings on paper shows Wilson at his methodical best: cultivating the kinks in the system. “Eleven” consist of 11 rectangles of solid color painted atop one another, from largest to smallest. “Twenty-two” features 22 colors. The progression continues in “Thirty-three,” “Forty-four” and “Fifty-five.”

As the compositions get more crowded, the colors get weirder. Words fail to convey their subtlety and don’t come close to describing the peculiar relationships among them. It’s also fascinating to watch blocky rectangles become linear strips and then fine lines.

The titles of other works, such as “Bacchus,” “Quartet,” “Coffee Cake” and “Green Gray Yellow,” hint at the range of Wilson’s interests. His abstractions leave viewers ample room to pursue their own pleasures, mixing instantaneous gratification with long-lasting satisfactions in fantastic combinations.

--

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Wash- ington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com

--

It adds up: Color steals the show

The fourth installment of L.A. Louver Gallery’s biannual summer exhibition “Rogue Wave ‘09: 10 Artists From Los Angeles” neither shoehorns art into a tidy, preconceived theme nor pretends that its diverse works don’t add up to something greater than their sum. Just the right touch of curatorial control is exercised. All of the emerging artists are given enough room to do their own thing, and visitors are trusted to intuit the connections that unfold among the highly accomplished paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, collages and videos.

Materials count, whether it’s the sound of bubble gum popping in Micol Hebron’s video installation; the flaccid strands of unwoven canvas in Dianna Molzan’s delicately desiccated abstract paintings; the slick surfaces of Tia Pulitzer’s monochrome statues; or the illusionistic blemishes meticulously manufactured in Kaz Oshiro’s otherwise mute abstractions.

Touch also matters. It runs the gamut from Richard Kraft’s lovingly abstracted comic strips to Annie Lapin’s explosive paintings of imploding landscapes to Fran Siegel’s gentle light-trap of a sculpture, carefully woven of wire, fishing line, scraps of film and fragments of porcelain.

Scale is essential, particularly to Olga Koumoundouros’ “Trickle Down,” a 23-foot-long, toilet-paper-wrapped sculpture that resembles a mummified rain gutter from a 19th century home.

But color steals the show.

It turns Matt Wedel’s “flower tree,” a nearly 7-foot-tall bouquet of glazed clay, into a menacing, bollard-shaped monolith, its spiky petals both beautiful and threatening.

The same double-edged impact is delivered by Erin Cosgrove’s “Happy Am I,” a hilariously scathing animated digital video that, in less than five minutes, tells the story of life’s emergence on Earth, the development of the world’s religions and the apocalypse. The sing-songy tone of Cosgrove’s diabolically cheery “We Are the World” mockery captures the terrifying nuttiness of the present.

--

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Sept. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.la louver.com

--

Pop as a vehicle for self-reflection

Pop Art has never been known to have much time for quiet contemplation. Soup cans, cola bottles and comic strips have seemed to be all about quickly delivered pleasures and even speedier messages.

But everything changes. At the Mark Moore Gallery, Todd Hebert’s new paintings reveal that Pop’s snappy graphics are not intrinsically opposed to slowly brewed sentiments that deepen into sustained meditations on big subjects such as mortality and the meaning of it all.

The images in Hebert’s easily recognized pictures are as common as the holidays: Fourth of July fireworks, snowmen and strings of twinkling Christmas lights. The techniques he uses -- airbrushed acrylic and super-realistic rendering -- have adorned hot rods and surfboards for decades. And influential artists such as Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Peter Alexander and Gerhard Richter have employed similar strategies and media to develop their signature styles or artistic “brands.”

Despite the likelihood of all these elements becoming cliches and adding up to tedious mediocrity, Hebert has managed to beat the odds to do something unlike anyone else. His nighttime pictures of soft-focused cityscapes, moonlit hillsides and reconfigured Hollywood signs use the readily accessible language of Pop as a vehicle for deliberate self-reflection. His works are cool and moving -- unique, without being self-obsessed; and social, without being stereotypical.

There’s romance in Hebert’s bittersweet pictures. They balance intimacy and distance in ways that leave plenty of room for melancholy and optimism, realism and mystery.

--

Mark Moore Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.markmooregallery.com

--

A funky trip back to the ‘60’s’

A 14-artist exhibition at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art is a fantastic time capsule that travels back to the 1960s to remind visitors that thinking about art exclusively in terms of masterpieces and superstars ignores lots of good stuff, including messy experimentation, struggle, self-discovery and goofiness. Simply titled “60’s,” the fascinating, often wonderfully funky show is also a good bit of revisionist history. It reveals the depth and complexity of an emerging art scene that has still not made it into the history books.

Well-known artists are represented by eye-opening early works. An untitled abstract painting from 1960 by John Coplans shows the artist, writer and editor as a capable colorist whose interest in stiff, interlocked geometry would soften, but never disappear, over his long career. “Power Plant,” a nearly 6-foot-square canvas by Barry Le Va, evokes Philip Guston and H.C. Westermann and filters both through LeVa’s lifelong focus on the power of line and its capacity for drama.

Lesser-known artists are represented by a high percentage of first-rate works. These include Roger Kuntz’s point-blank painting of the lines painted in the intersections of busy city streets; Ynez Johnston’s raw canvas that recalls ancient cave paintings; Ron Miyashiro’s three frighteningly sexual sculptures; and John Barbour’s six hard-edged abstractions, each snazzier than its neighbor.

Worthy if not utterly origi- nal pieces by such often-overlooked artists as Tom Eatherton, Michael Olodort, Jim Eller and Stan Bitters add depth and a sense of interconnectedness to a scene defined by great inventiveness and even more back-and-forth, up-and-down dialogue.

--

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washing- ton Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cardwelljimmerson.com

--

calendar@latimes.com