AROUND THE GALLERIES : Artist as actor as artist

William Powhida has an agenda. Many of them, actually. He wants to be a great artist. He wants to be rich and famous. And he wants to remain an earnest outsider, averse to selling out. You can read what he believes, what he laments and what he desperately craves in the painted lists and letters in his savagely funny show at Charlie James.

Accept capitalism, he advises fellow artists in a litany of strategic sales tips. “Maintain a vague political subtext.” “Lie about your age. Stay thirty.” And if all else fails, “Just sell your soul to Larry” -- ruthlessly enterprising dealer Larry Gagosian, that is.

The Brooklyn-based Powhida is an artist as well as a critic, an irresistible double-dipper and ingenious double-crosser. The chief project of his art is the creation and expression of his own persona, a self-aggrandizing self-doubter, in turns irreverent and sycophantic. Powhida has made himself a character in an ongoing parody of the life of an aspiring artist, and gone even further to conceive of an upcoming biopic whose star remains in character as Powhida for media interviews. A convincing trailer for the purported film plays in the gallery. An equally persuasive painted rendering of a magazine spread on the actor is also on view. Authentic and fabricated blur together, the balance ever shifting. Powhida’s work takes the form of drawing, painting, film and installation, but it is essentially an all-embracing performance, one that sustains pitch-perfect tone throughout.

Powhida spoofs the pretentiously earnest artist’s statement in his own scathingly honest version, his voice oscillating between self-righteous, angry and pathetic. He creates a mock news release announcing the acquisition of the artist in his entirety by the Broad Art Foundation.

The text, wry in both concept and execution, reeks of self-congratulatory artspeak. In a letter to L.A. artists, Powhida offers to trade in his New York art career for a West Coast model. He starts off condescendingly, presumptuously, addressing West Coast wannabes from his coveted East Coast perch, but gradually he drops his cover and begs for a chance to resuscitate his dying career among trees, water, sand and mountains.

His hilarious riffs on the contemporary art world are not just verbal treats. They’re visual gems of trompe l’oeil illusionism. Powhida’s lists, rants and manifestoes look like manically filled sheets torn from spiral-bound notebooks, taped to the wall, but they too are performances, skilled masquerades in graphite, watercolor and colored pencil.

Again, Powhida adopts multiple voices at once: that of the urgent young artist eager to do anything to become the next sensation, and that of the traditional still life painter, meticulously rendering one flat object atop another, in the manner of 19th century greats John Frederick Peto and William Harnett.

However much Powhida the character flails in his anxious ambition, Powhida the maker stays well grounded in art historical tradition. He is a social satirist in the manner of Daumier and Hogarth, up-to-date, up-to-speed, up to some pretty cutting commentary. His work shares a bit of common ground with Jim Torok’s cartoon drawings about the artist’s life and responds directly to the early text paintings of John Baldessari.

Powhida’s “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell (New and Unimproved)” takes its basic title from Baldessari’s tongue-in-cheek 1966-68 painting recommending the use of light over dark colors, still lifes free of morbid props and the avoidance of cows and hens as subject matter.

To be a successful artist used to be a matter of answering a powerful inner call -- at least according to romanticized myth. All that romance has long been stripped away by the power of the market, the proliferation of MFA programs and any number of other societal forces.

Now, success depends on a canny marketing formula as much as anything else. Savvy, smart and self-reflexive, a pleasure to look at and a hoot to read, Powhida’s work sells itself with a vengeance.

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Charlie James Gallery, 975 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 687-0844, through Dec. 5. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. www.cjamesgallery.com

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Revisiting the art of the miniature

Alexander Gorlizki’s paintings on paper dazzle the eye and tickle the mind. They are intricate beyond comprehension, their filament-thin lines congregating in dense, patterned fields. The works, most roughly the size of a sheet of notebook paper, spring from the traditions of Indian miniatures and manuscript illumination. They bear some Op Art and Pop Art flourishes, and indulge in a bit of surrealism for subversive effect.

The British-born Gorlizki, who lives in New York and maintains a studio of artisans in India, covers a lot of ground in his 40-plus paintings at Daniel Weinberg. Many of them are simply exquisite eye candy swirls, spirals and camouflage patterns meticulously painted in microscopic strokes with single-hair brushes. Others are representational teases, hybrids of the familiar and the fanciful. In “Eruption,” for instance, a green stem springs from a crimson cone and grows into a loose lattice for oversize chrysanthemum-like blossoms.

Occasionally, Gorlizki paints atop magazine pages or photographic prints, smothering a sheet with pattern but letting eyes or lips from the underlying image show through, as if he is casting a spell, then breaking it. These are the least compelling of his works, mostly because the windows he frames to another world offer such a limited, mundane view. The paintings that borrow most heavily from Mughal miniatures fare better, their precious, antiquated form given over to motley miscellany: a princely figure seated on the back of a pigeon, a goat sucking on a hookah, a ram in formal dress holding a badminton racquet, a cow standing on the seat of a necessarily huge chair. Rendered in jewel tones with gold accents on what appears to be delicate, old paper, these spectacular little performances are spiked with anachronistic jokes and technical thrills.

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Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 954-8425, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www. danielweinberggallery.com

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Poetry, as written in photography

Frank Paulin’s first L.A. show at Duncan Miller in 2005 introduced a fine, little-known street photographer equipped with both the poetic instincts and quick reflexes required of the genre.

Now the gallery unveils another facet of Paulin’s talent: color.

Paulin, now 84, hit his stride in the mid-1950s, not long after studying under Harry Callahan and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He shot in both black and white and color, but rarely printed in color because of the expense.

The most vibrant work here was shot a half-century ago but never printed until this year.

Many of the pictures read like montages, layered assemblages of motion, reflection and signage, the choreography of the city (usually Manhattan) stilled for a brief, dynamic moment.

In “Coca-Cola” (1956), a pyramid of oranges rests on a lunch counter next to grape and lime beverage dispensers. An aproned attendant’s face is profiled beneath a gleaming neon Coca-Cola sign, and framed on one side by a window’s filmy reflection of cars and buildings, and on the other by a jaunty punctuation of product names: Kleenex, Chunky, Tums, Ponds, Milky Way.

In these keenly observed synchronies, Paulin captures the sacred rubbing up against the profane, the ordinary yearning toward the ideal. Window shoppers reach toward the glass as if to test the threshold between everyday and dream. Reflections interweave the solid and diaphanous.

Like time capsules newly unearthed, these photographs conjure the rhythms, textures and tones of a period long since past.

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Duncan Miller Gallery, 10959 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 838-2440, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.duncanmillergallery .com

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Oh, go write it on a cardboard sign

“Does this sign make me look fat?” “No shoes, No shirt. You’re probably rich.”

Alejandro Diaz’s cardboard and neon signs at Happy Lion earn an immediate, reflexive laugh. The thinnest of them stop there, one-liners with modest bite. The best of them, however, linger on, leaving a rich, residual discomfort.

The centerpiece of the Texas-born, New York-based Diaz’s uneven show is the “World’s Largest Cardboard Sign,” a free-standing, 10-by-12-foot exercise in simple, self-declarative humor. Far more provocative is the blank, rough-edged, faux-cardboard rectangle that hangs near its own museum-style label, designating its title as “Homeless and Speechless.” This piece is also simple in form, but its muteness resonates; the empty sign sends a complex, contradictory message about disenfranchisement on one hand and the entitled pretense of art-like behavior on the other.

Diaz mixes idioms throughout vernacular signage, social and political commentary, self-reflexive art wit, but the combinations don’t always generate interesting friction. The commercial-style neon signs recall Bruce Nauman but lack his work’s metaphysical heft.

In one of the show’s more absorbing pieces, Diaz spreads a Mexican blanket on the ground and covers it with a collection of handwritten signs on cardboard scrap, the kind commonly held by people seeking a handout. Diaz appeals not to our wallets but to a self-mocking sense of humor with signs reading “beg to differ,” “By disappointment only,” “The Filet Mignon of affordable conceptual art.”

In this humble form, his puns and savvy jabs feel a little like slumming, but they also point to a basic connection between art, resourcefulness and hunger.

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The Happy Lion, 963 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 625-1360, through Nov. 28. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.thehappylion.com