Highlights from the art galleries
Devan Shimoyama and Salómon Huerta, Farrah Karapetian and more.
With just the right mix of purposefulness and playfulness, the two-artist exhibition “Devan Shimoyama/Salómon Huerta” at Samuel Freeman gallery sets visitors to thinking about what it means to be human while leaving us free to make up our own minds.
Such independence also matches the attitudes embodied by Shimoyama’s glitter-sprinkled self-portraits and Huerta’s charcoal drawings and oils on canvas, most of which are also portraits.
Pittsburgh artist Shimoyama’s L.A. debut features six midsize canvases. Slapdash theatricality — and whip-smart intelligence — animates his potent pictures. Each combines a wild variety of techniques and materials. Delicately drawn images, hastily cut reproductions, quickly sketched backdrops and exuberantly painted passages make for a promiscuous stew of anything-goes intensity.
Glitter, sequins, rhinestones, beads, fabric f lowers, plastic leaves and stuffed animals add color and rambunctiousness. This suggests that each painting is a miniature Mardi Gras parade and that human identity is all about strutting one’s stuff.
In a series of small photographs, Shimoyama does exactly that. Wearing little more than a tinfoil codpiece and googly eyeglasses, he appears to be a dreadlocked shaman who has washed up from the deep.
In contrast, Huerta’s paintings and drawings are understated. All were made in the early 1990s, just before Huerta got attention for painting pictures of the backs of people’s heads. All are intimate, melancholic, restrained.
Tattoos figure prominently, as does religious imagery and just a hint of sexuality. The most confrontational is a small painting of a young Latino depicted as if he were Caucasian. In Huerta’s hands, identity is not worn on one’s sleeve. It is something to be discovered only when you get past appearances.
Paired, Huerta’s early works and Shimoyama’s recent ones reveal that identity is a slippery enterprise — and that what people identify with is even more difficult to predict, much less pin down.
Samuel Freeman, 2639 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 425-8601, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.samuelfreeman.com
Fascinating photograms
Farrah Karapetian makes photographs the oldfashioned way: placing objects on sheets of treated paper, shining lights on her simple studio setups and then fixing the images with chemicals.
The L.A. artist also improvises freely, splashing water onto the paper, letting bits of ice melt atop it and even transferring some digitally generated images to the otherwise blank sheets with which she begins.
The 12 new photograms in her exhibition “Relief ” at Von Lintel Gallery are the messiest she has made. They’re also the most sensual, entrancing and fascinating. Giving visitors plenty to look at and even more to wonder about, they make a virtue of uncertainty.
At a time when so many photographs leave so little to the imagination, it’s satisfying to come across pictures that give you so much to chew on, mull over and ponder. Mysteriousness is Karapetian’s specialty.
Her Chromogenic photograms, some framed, others push-pinned to the wall, work on many levels. For hedonists, there are rich, supersaturated colors, glistening details that look super-realistic, metallic textures that are resplendent, puddly splashes that are happy accidents and abstract shapes that rival nature for its nuance.
If you love process, Karapetian’s photograms serve up an encyclopedic survey of the various ways images — photographic and painterly — are made. Every step is visible in her works, which hide nothing because they are based on the conviction that transparency, not secrecy, serves art best. In the old days, that was called letting it all hang out.
Formalists and historians, scientists and mystics, people who like pictures and those drawn to abstraction will find what they like in Karapetian’s shape-shifting works. That fluidity makes
for one-of-a-kind prints that can never be seen the same way twice.
Von Lintel Gallery, 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 559-5700, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vonlintel.com
Beautiful disruption
Philip Argent’s new paintings are everything — and nothing — like his old ones.
In terms of palette, format and paint application, Argent’s 15 variously sized acrylics on canvas at Shoshana Wayne Gallery share much with the works in his last solo show in Los Angeles in 2009, as well as with just about everything the Santa Barbara painter has exhibited since he graduated from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1994.
In those diagrammatic landscapes, subtle colors, disruptive compositions and squeaky-clean brushwork made for abstract dramas that aligned the magic of artistic creation and the birth of the universe. The possibilities represented by digital technology melded with the powers of the imagination, both of which verged on infinity and evoked sci-fi sublimity.
Argent’s new paintings are darker and more Spartan. The diamond dust that once gave his canvases their sexy shimmer is nowhere to be found in “Misaligned,” which is all about dashed dreams, derailed expectations and the yawning gaps between what is promised and what is delivered.
Skepticism takes a few slippery steps toward paranoia.
The colors of Argent’s paintings are queasy. Just as unnatural as before, they are less trippy and more toxic, suggesting the presence of such invisible agents as mustard gas, nuclear radiation and lead poisoning.
Extreme spatial shifts disrupt their splintered compositions. In some, massive expanses of mutant pastels block out otherwise meticulously tricked-out sections, where laser-sharp lines bisect noxious puddles of muddy colors and vast expanses of burbling goo that might be the digital version of primordial soup, if such a thing existed.
Argent’s monochrome fields — in matte pink, dead lavender and light-swallowing aqua — are so flat they make you feel as if large parts of his paintings have flat-lined. Whole chunks of his fastidiously detailed surfaces seem to have gone missing. In a sense, his abstract canvases are the visual equivalent of malware, their various components at war with one another.
Despite all the destruction, Argent’s paintings are still beautiful — in the way that smog-choked sunsets and the billowing smoke caused by forest fires are.
That complexity, and conflict, gives “Misaligned” its punch and resonance. Disruption never looked better — or more dreadful.
Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.shoshanawayne.com
Mundane made magnificent
Toba Khedoori burst onto the scene 20 years ago with small drawings on gigantic sheets of paper. Her realistic depictions of interiors and exteriors seemed to say: “Come in for a close look, and don’t forget to block out all of the distractions that might prevent you from focusing.”
At Regen Projects, the L.A. artist’s fourth solo hometown show features much smaller works: domestically scaled graphite drawings and oils on canvas and linen. What Khedoori’s works give up in size they get back in intensity, not to mention self-assuredness, maturity, pragmatism and generosity.
Some turn the structure of her early works inside out. Rather than presenting viewers with an image surrounded by a vast expanse of wax-coated emptiness, Khedoori puts emptiness front and center.
Two pieces depict walls into which holes appear to have been punched. The compositions of two others are interrupted by what appears to be the glare from a camera’s flash. Bright light forms a blind spot in all four, creating a glitch in vision that makes you look more attentively.
The remaining works divide evenly between abstraction and representation: grids and pictures. A human hand shows up in three nearly square paintings, its delicacy eliciting both desire and devotion. Gorgeously illuminated leaves fill the foreground of Khedoori’s most complex composition. Its icy white background amps up the otherworldly lusciousness of the leaves.
Similarly, the abstract compositions slow time to a crawl. Space comes out of nowhere to make room for all sorts of experiences. Attentiveness — and how we value it — is Khedoori’s great subject. Like Vija Celmins, she makes the mundane magnificent.
Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.regenprojects.com