AROUND THE GALLERIES

By David Pagel

June 5, 2009 12 AM PT

About 15 years ago, Philip Argent helped put L.A. painting in the spotlight by making Hard-Edge Abstraction look as sexy and progressive as it did in its heyday, when Karl Benjamin, Frederick Hammersley, John McLaughlin and their cohorts invented the hip, optimistic style in the 1950s. Argent brought the laser-sharp contours and screaming colors of their abstract compositions into the Digital Age, transforming organic shapes and pulsating patterns into supersaturated images fueled by computer technology and animated by the possibilities of instantaneous communication.

In eight new paintings and three small collages at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Argent takes things further, pushing his suave compositions beyond the breaking point while holding everything together. With a loaded combination of graceful, painterly aplomb and self-effacing humility that is flat-out thrilling, he paints the big bang as if it has just happened. Its shock waves seem about ready to hit us.

Each of the Santa Barbara-based, Las Vegas-educated and British-born artist’s acrylics on canvas contains more whiplash visual shifts than the best Cubist collage. Yet Argent’s oddly elegant pictures of cartoon clouds, neon-tinted pixels, gaseous atmospheres and swirling spills of primordial ooze avoid the rough cut-and-paste fragmentation of classic collage.

Each spacious, often vaporous and occasionally icy-hot concoction seems to be three or four paintings condensed so that they all occupy the same surface. At the same time, you can’t shake the feeling that as you are scanning one element of one hyper-refined painting -- say, the gorgeous gradations of purple that pop up in various parts of “Untitled (Fascia #10)” -- you’re missing what’s happening in other parts of the painting. The rest of the works seem to be cut from the same cloth or made from the same strand of DNA.

Think of Argent’s deliriously beautiful, subtly toxic paintings as the visual equivalent of computer viruses that scramble files in ways that make more sense than the originals. Such unpredictability can be maddening. But when the ghost in the machine works its magic, as it does in Argent’s expansive abstractions, you come face to face with the sublime without leaving everyday life behind.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .shoshanawayne.com.

Fantastically unsavory

Disasters pile up like train wrecks in Kelly McLane’s powerfully dark, profoundly realistic exhibition at Angles Gallery. Consisting of six generally big paintings, five generally small drawings and one knockout sculpture, the artist’s fantastically grim exhibition depicts the apocalypse as if it were yesterday’s news.

Titled “ . . . And Swine Flew Too!” McLane’s 10th solo show in Los Angeles since 1996 turns a bit of folk wisdom on its ear to suggest that the impossible has happened; it’s just not what we expected. Pigs do not literally fly in her hallucinatory pictures of stampeding buffalo, headless horsemen, crashing airplanes and spinning Ferris wheels. But if they did, they would not be out of place.

McLane is a master draftsperson. Her drawings are always up close and personal. This forces viewers to be intimate with people and ideas that are unsavory at best.

In “Zero Gravity Madonna Lab,” plump pink babies grow like hothouse tomatoes as older kids, in hermetically sealed bubbles, evoke science experiments gone wrong. In “Flaming Arrow,” a sunny sky rains cherubic cowgirls as a monstrous maw opens in the desert floor to devour everything around it.

Her paintings add depth and color to such point-blank encounters, making the grand sweep of history come alive. If her oils and acrylics on canvas were novels, they would have a lot in common with works by Mark Twain, Wallace Stegner and Thomas Pynchon.

McLane’s 8-foot-tall sculpture gives queasy 3-D form to the dramas that unfold in her paintings. In it, mutant sumo wrestlers made of porcelain suffer, die and turn to stone, but not before big pink candy crystals burst from some of their stomachs.

McLane’s nightmarish yet clear-eyed works survey a world in which horrific absurdity and poetic justice collide. The sins of the past revisit the present in ways that make yesterday’s excesses look like a walk in the park. Moments of sweet innocence are few and far between, and all the more important for their rarity.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .anglesgallery.com.

Splintering

of space

Long before paintings became objects that people could hang in their homes after transporting them from an artist’s studio, they were part of the architecture of the church, castle or cave for which they were made. At the newly relocated Cherry and Martin Gallery, Antonio Adriano Puleo takes visitors back to those times, when painting, sculpture and architecture were all of a piece and formed a total environment.

Neither sentimental nor nostalgic, Puleo is not interested in turning back the clock. His bold orchestrations of shapes and forms are as futuristic and radical as they are alert to the world beyond the rather antiseptic space in which art ordinarily is exhibited.

In a typical Puleo painting, space is made physical. It is built from simple geometric shapes, like triangles, squares and rectangles, in screeching, fluorescent colors and resplendent ochers, golds and greens. All are accented by thick black and white bands, swirling, atmospheric passages and slick, wood-veneer finishes.

Space is then splintered. Some sections are pushed into the distance and others are pulled forward, like a Hans Hofmann painting on acid. Super-realistic images of birds, some cut from Audubon books and others from reproductions of medieval manuscripts, contrast dramatically with the abstract shapes, fracturing space further.

Finally, the fragments are reconfigured, locked into place by the kinky symmetry of Puleo’s uncanny design work. And that’s just the beginning.

Puleo also paints the gallery walls in patterns that play off those in his mural-size canvases and panels. In front of them, he installs pyramid-shaped sculptures made of wood and stained glass and illuminated from within.

The result is wacky and satisfying, an ambitious installation that makes strange bedfellows of Baroque cathedrals and American Minimalism while recalling Egyptian hieroglyphics, medieval symbols and amped-to-the-max camouflage. Puleo never tells you what to think of what you see, but his art makes you see everything differently.

Cherry and Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-0100, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .cherryandmartin.com.

A touch of melancholy

Over the last couple of decades, Pae White has made art out of almost nothing but thin air: a handful of cat whiskers affixed in a drop of glue, a spray-painted spider web set in resin and the shimmering reflections cast from a slab of mirrored Plexiglas sheets. At 1301PE, the light-handed artist continues her lighthearted gambit, transforming incidental things into instances of wonder that are ripe with delight.

What’s new is the delicate touch of melancholy. Smoke and leaves are the vehicles for White’s casually exquisite installation, which consists of woven tapestries, laser-carved sheets of brightly colored paper and hundreds of fake leaves, all made mechanically and many painted, stained and shaped by hand.

Each of the six door-size tapestries downstairs is made up of a Donald Judd-style stack of three, four or five photographic close-ups of smoke sinuously drifting as it dissipates and eventually disappears into pure blackness. The languor of David Reed’s paintings comes to mind, as does the romance of black-and-white movies, the illicitness of opium dens and the slinky glamour of Tom Wesselman’s larger-than-life pictures of lips opened and slowly blowing out puffs of nicotine-laced smoke.

Upstairs, a nearly 10-by-22-foot tapestry covers one wall with a single image of smoke doing its serpentine thing as it moves from right to left, bottom to top. Titled “Smoke Knows,” White’s woven image is a masterpiece of dazzling silvers, crystalline whites and luxurious blacks, every silky thread part of a drama both ordinary and out of this world.

Ten small works on paper feature single wisps of smoke. Each has its own atmosphere and personality.

Topping it off are piles of eucalyptus, ginkgo and sycamore leaves that look like the real thing, until you look closely and notice that those in “November Gutter Leaves, Pasadena” are made of canvas stretched over aluminum armatures and those in “Blackened, Screeching Leaves” are painted aluminum.

Nature and artifice almost never look this good together. But White wouldn’t have it any other way.

1301PE, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 938-5822, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.1301pe.com.

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