Transmitted and transmuted

Ten new paintings by Monique van Genderen include some of the most ambitious works this increasingly accomplished artist has produced.

For her third solo show at Happy Lion Gallery -- the last was in 2005 -- Van Genderen established a uniform format. Each work is 6 feet high and 4 feet wide, familiar dimensions for paintings that address a spectator’s body as well as eye. Their carefully calibrated scale initially moves you into place, effortlessly showing you where to stand to look at them.

When you do, it’s the painting’s surface that first grabs your attention, with specific colors, shapes and the overall composition registering more slowly. Van Genderen’s surfaces are exceedingly strange -- alternately transparent and reflective, and in some areas thinly layered so as to border on translucence. Occasionally it’s matte, but a closer look reveals that those are restricted to the white areas, which also define the physical surface of the wooden panels on which she works. The effect heightens the difference between the material and visual distinctions in each abstract picture.

The various levels of transparency and reflection are achieved through different types of paint. Van Genderen employs oil, enamel and alkyd (a resin-based oil paint). Whenever the white ground appears -- sometimes as a large expanse, elsewhere as just a narrow sliver between color shapes -- it is flat and optically inert, as if sucking all the light out of the room. The surface plane gets underscored as the meeting ground of the corporeal and the visual, the physically embodied and the fleetingly glimpsed.

This bracing dialogue between body and sight continues in the colored forms Van Genderen paints. Some emphasize a single stroke with a wide brush. Others suggest torn sheets of colored paper. (Her past work has included collages and murals made from sheets of cut vinyl.) Handwriting -- a kind of pictorial penmanship -- frequently comes to mind, and with it the art of calligraphy.

Van Genderen’s color choices range from organic to synthetic -- from the pastoral colors of the garden to the neon lights of the nightclub. There are nods to Andy Warhol’s flowers and to Georgia O’Keeffe’s very different blossoms. Matisse’s sumptuous interiors turn up in window-like shapes that seem to frame a painting-within-the-painting.

“Nocturne,” one of the few works in the show to carry a title, wears its kinship to James McNeill Whistler on its gorgeous sleeve. Dark, flickering streams of watery gray colors speckled with turquoise blue and bright green conjure fireworks on a river and a Persian rug.

The result is a surprising spatial complexity achieved only through the play of actual light and color. Van Genderen’s paintings recall 1950s sources as diverse as Helen Frankenthaler’s Color-field paintings, which are essentially watercolors writ very large (and in oil on canvas), and Lorser Feitelson’s “magical space forms,” which employ graphic design techniques to manipulate the illusion of three dimensions through emphatically two-dimensional methods. Still, these paintings aren’t merely retro.

What Van Genderen adds to the pictorial mix is the experience of a world awash in modern reproductions -- both mechanical, as in printed magazine, book or catalog pages, and digital, as viewed on the screens of televisions, computers and cellphones. The printed page and the transmitted screen seem to be the ground zero for these remarkable abstract paintings, which are among the most compelling being made right now.

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The Happy Lion Gallery, 963 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1360, through July 11. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.thehappylion.com

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Freedom’s fantasy, lives stand still

“Hipnostasis,” a collaborative video installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon, is by turns celebratory and baleful. Fantasies of freedom are lionized and lamented.

A narrow, corridor-like gallery on the second floor of the Armory Center for the Arts holds three elements. At one end, a 7-foot-tall, phallus-shaped sculpture that recalls a Hindu lingam hides a video projector inside; the words “dead end” flash in and out of view, projected on the ceiling. At the other end, 28 pages from old books are pinned to the wall; faded pages from works by Laurence Sterne, Rudyard Kipling, Jack Kerouac -- authors of boy books, variously regarded as adventurers dissolute or corrupt -- have been added to in Pettibon’s familiar script: “we seem to hear his sermons over again,” “the play has left the stage” and more.

Then there is Samuel Beckett’s “Malone Dies,” a non-narrative novel of an old man’s struggle with consciousness, which seems to set up the installation’s centerpiece. A half-dozen small, flat-screen video monitors, connected by scrawled graffiti and a tangle of wiring that disappears into the wall, show video portraits of six grizzled men, singly and as a group. Bearded, scraggly-haired and weather-beaten, they are seated on a rocky outcropping at the ocean’s edge, several munching on food.

“Hipnostasis,” which is one word scrawled on the wall, reads like a mash-up of hippies, hypnosis and hypostasis -- the last a philosophical notion that connotes an essential condition of humanity, as well as a rather contrary medical condition of poor circulation that leaves sediment in the organs. Are these “lost boys” at the beach merely reenacting an ancient need for unfettered existence? Or, did they just not get out enough into the unfathomable wonders of a diverse world?

Pettibon and Okon don’t answer such questions, seeking instead to limn a portrait and place it inside an illuminating frame of complex design. The image of men on the rocks reminded me of a male version of ancient Greek sirens, whose purity of voice and irresistible charms lured sailors to their ruin. With its soundtrack of roaring surf, the scene is inescapably bereft.

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Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 792-5101, through Aug. 31. Closed Mondays. www .armoryarts.org

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Indie attitude, theatrical flair

If there’s such a thing as indie rock, can there be such a thing as indie rock art? Jason Yates’ neo-psychedelic posters of freak-show adolescent overload -- individually decorated with enough ink, puff balls, glitter and decorative stickers that, sometimes, the residue slides off the paper and down the wall to puddle on the floor -- offer evidence to an answer in the affirmative.

To what effect, it is hard to say. On the mezzanine of Circus Gallery, the posters hang adjacent to a hooked-rug portrait of bug-eyed, top-hatted, 1970s blues-rocker Captain Beefheart -- a.k.a Don Van Vliet, 1980s Neo-Expressionist painter. The rug possesses a suitable weirdness lacking in the posters, but neither is as captivating as the far more conventional paintings downstairs in the main gallery.

Most of these are two-panel works, including one that is three-dimensional and free-standing. They start with clusters of parallel strokes reminiscent of Jasper Johns’ hatch paintings from the ‘70s. Yates’ are drawn in ink (typically red, white or black), and they don’t appear to be arranged in repetitive patterns or in mirror images from one panel to the other. (Two works have the pattern etched into mirror.) The canvas is cut in scores of scalloped shapes, curled away from the surface and held out from it by a rod glued inside. These flaps are backed with flat color or metallic Mylar in silver or gold, as are the newly exposed surfaces underneath.

These maneuvers complicate the visual appeal, adding unexpected flashes of reflected internal light as you move in front of the paintings. (In the mirrored works, the pattern is unexpectedly reflected back into receding space.) Yates also stops the scalloped hatching nearly a foot from the bottom edge of the large paintings, giving a hip design the old-fashioned look of theatrical curtains.

What’s most attractive about these works is their obsessiveness -- a hard-core focus on numb repetition that, in one corner, jumps off the paintings and onto the gallery’s stairway wall, which sports its own floor-to-ceiling pattern of laboriously drawn, striped zigzags. Johns once said the hatch pattern appealed to him because it held the possibility of complete lack of meaning. Yates seems to be after something similar. Here, however, the disintegration of order in his obsessive hatching is part wrap-around reality and part exuberant theatrical motif.

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Circus Gallery, 7065 Lexington Ave., Hollywood, (323) 962-8506, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .circus-gallery.com

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christopher.knight @latimes.com