Billy Al Bengston, Ann Preston, Mercedes Matter, Chris Barnard

Studio slang that expressed effusive approval in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, whether swaggering or sentimental, became literal subject matter for numerous artists in the 1960s. Jasper Johns was a leading practitioner. For instance, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, his infamous “Painting With Two Balls” -- a pair of actual spheres inserted into a canvas vigorously brushed with gestural color -- lampooned the era’s machismo posturing.

Billy Al Bengston is another artist who took slang at its pictorial word. At Samuel Freeman Gallery, an approximate re-creation of Bengston’s second painting exhibition, held at L.A.’s Ferus Gallery 50 years ago this week, brings the strategy into focus.

In keeping with the season, it features a group of works whose central motif is a valentine. Now, that’s a painting with heart.

Bengston had been impressed with Johns’ American flags and other proto-Pop paintings during a 1958 European encounter at the Venice Biennale, when he was 24. Stuck in a gestural painting rut, like many American artists as the Ab Ex decade was drawing to a close, Bengston wanted out. The marvelous Ferus/Freeman exhibition shows him working his way into new terrain.

Geometry helped, toppling gesture from its pinnacle. The show includes two small canvases that feature a cruciform shape in the center of a square, its linear periphery piled high with an inch of thick oil paint, like wintry snowdrifts. Eight more paintings on paper sport cruciform shapes, some with tentative hearts beginning to emerge.

A monumental canvas, 6 1/2 feet high and 7 1/2 feet wide, nests a series of Josef Albers-type squares inside a gunmetal gray field of lightly brushed paint. Confetti-like daubs of bright color frame the canvas, while a crimson line and checkerboards of yellow-ocher and white or black and blue frame the big, bifurcated heart in the center. The heart and its background are painted four shades of green.

Titled “Big Hollywood,” it’s the mother ship for a host of subsequent Bengston paintings that take the first names of movie stars. “Sophia” (as in Loren) is a small but voluptuous canvas whose complementary colors of blue and orange ignite optical sparks in the central heart.

Bengston’s geometric formats and repetition of imagery seem designed to free up the paintings from the nagging problem of subject matter. Instead, they’re material meditations on luminous, sensual color.

The works are installed in a faithful reconstruction of the original Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, an exceedingly modest footprint within Freeman Gallery and complete with a dropped-ceiling of acoustic tiles, clumsy lighting and brown twill carpeting. Proprietor Walter Hopps provided Ferus’ intellectual core, and seeing Bengston’s reconstructed show reminded me of Hopps’ commitment to the quixotic genius Wallace Berman, whose aesthetic motto was “Art is Love is God.” Bengston’s Hollywood valentines enfold that sentiment in surprising ways.

A second partial reconstruction in the gallery, following installations of Bengston’s more flatly decorative recent work, assembles eight beautiful lacquer and polyester resin paintings on squares of aluminum. Called “dentos,” they’re folded, spindled and mutilated, some by a good whacking with a ball-peen hammer.

Why beat up a painting surface, which is about to have luscious pigment poured all over it? Well, given the vaguely condescending term “finish fetish” being applied to so much sleek, 1960s Los Angeles art, banging up the object was one good way to subsume preciosity.

So was showing the “dentos” in a dark room by candlelight, as they are here and were originally in 1970 at Rico Mizuno Gallery. Claims of mystical aura are undercut, art’s reigning period- cliché of California sunshine is neatly unplugged and sensuous perception is italicized. That’s called a hat-trick.

Samuel Freeman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through March 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.samuel freeman.com.

Some puzzles to wonder over

Sculptor Ann Preston has a wonderful habit of pushing a thesis so hard that at some indefinable point it tips over into its antithesis, leaving a viewer gasping at the charmed madness of it all. You wonder: How did we get from there to here?

Once it was Expressionist heads, the emotional rawness of their facial features soon seeming to be a clever cover for hidden states of authentic being. Her new abstract sculptural relief at Rosamund Felsen Gallery -- Preston’s first solo in more than a decade -- does it with the precision of mathematical logic. In no time, sharp systemic principles seem to be the textbook definition of utter irrationality.

The stainless steel relief, nearly 9 feet high and more than 14 feet wide, spans a gallery corner. The relief feels less like an object or a surface than the intimation of an enveloping environment.

Its internal shapes derive from the location. The tetrahedrons describe the four faces of the mostly hidden spatial pyramid created by the room’s two walls and floor, plus the sculpture. Preston has applied a waxed, tobacco-brown patina on some of the sculpture’s planes, while others maintain their silvery hue. Deep shadows and bright highlights emphasize the irregularly faceted surface.

Visually the form opens and closes in syncopated rhythms, a pattern that a gallery handout says is determined by the golden ratio. For centuries artists have used that mathematical equation: The ratio of the larger side to the smaller one equals the ratio of the sum of both sides to the larger side.

High up in the relief, 10 of those surfaces bend, warp and ripple, billowing into unexpectedly organic shapes. They suggest sensuous body parts -- breasts, buttocks, thighs, labia -- that contradict the relief’s otherwise aggressive, even vaguely hostile forms. Sculptural dualities start to multiply: hard/soft, machine/body, masculine/feminine, science/poetry.

The show also includes six acrylic paintings on shaped panels, three watercolors and five small sculptures, plus two photographs (by Grant Mudford) of a related monumental relief Preston made for a performing arts center in Utah. These supporting works unfold the underlying logic.

A series of interlocking pyramids painted in pale, pastel acrylics on a triangular panel creates the complex illusion of intersecting square tunnels. An octa- gonal panel incorporates curved lines that connect the corners of triangles within the composition, establishing a surprising organic web inside a rigorously rectilinear structure. Four distended steel tetrahedrons on nearby pedestals begin the extrapolation into three dimensions.

Preston’s paintings and sculptures are absorbing puzzles with no solutions. The wonder of the puzzlement emerges as its own reward.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through March 13. Closed Sun- days and Mondays. www .rosamundfelsen.com.

A child who grew larger

Mercedes Matter (1913-2001) was a minor New York School artist whose primary claim to notice was applying Abstract Expressionist scale to School of Paris painting. Still-life abstractions derived from Cézanne-style easel paintings are closer to the size of canvases by Rothko or De Kooning.

A sketchy traveling retrospective at Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum assembles 38 paintings and three charcoal drawings, starting with juvenilia. (The show is supported by and comes with an oversized catalog published by the gallery that handles her estate -- the same gallery that in 2005 unveiled a group of 32 small, previously unknown Jackson Pollock drip-paintings, “discovered” by Matter’s son, now widely dismissed as inauthentic.) Matter’s father, early American Modernist Arthur B. Carles, began her instruction as a child, and the show opens with a pair of precocious, Matisse-inspired color abstractions made when she was about 8 years old.

Following later study with Hans Hofmann, who seems to have taught or influenced just about every New York School painter, she briefly toyed with pure abstraction, thickly painted. But soon Matter returned to still lifes, composed as either big, chromatically vibrant force-fields, or else dramatic charcoal drawings, often on exposed canvas board.

Triangular, prismatic forms and linear vectors alter placid arrangements of bowls, fruits, mounded tablecloths and an occasional landscape into energized fields of flat, jagged hues. Like many American painters of her father’s generation, she worked toward a synthesis of Fauve color and Cubist structure; but the scale of her work came to outstrip theirs. Perhaps that diffusion of intensity helps to explain their general feeling of clumsiness.

Weisman Museum, Pep- perdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 506-4556, through April 4. Closed Mondays. www.arts.pepperdine.edu.

Looking at art as a battlefield

“Full Spectrum Dominance,” the title of Chris Barnard‘s show of five recent paintings at Sam Lee Gallery, is the name of an American military doctrine that is also sheerest fantasy: In a war zone, the military attempts total control over every feature of the battleground, including hardware, software and manpower.

It might look good on paper, especially in the procurement office, but the inevitable chasm between theory and practice shows that such a thing is impossible. Barnard’s large abstract paintings enact various collisions between flat, mechanistic patterning and the liquid illusion of deep, luminous space to create a grinding metaphor for this conflicted form of thinking.

A circular shape like a steely gray turbojet flickers with spectral color, glimpsed through its core and exploding in fiery dribbles around its periphery. A digital gray checkerboard tilts back into an atmospheric blue sky, glowing ominously at one side, while another vertical checkerboard warps as it abuts a watery multicolored form. Rainbow-colored horizontal lines stutter across a massive, mottled, charcoal brown form, as if it were the visual equivalent of stone scraping metal.

Barnard pits intimations of rockets, weaponry and computer information against organic fields of sumptuous color. If the sideswipe would sometimes benefit from greater pictorial pressure and chromatic stress, the best works, such as “Booster” and “No Exit,” do their job with skill.

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., Chinatown, (323) 227-027, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.samleegallery .com.