Exuberance on point

Peter Williams’ tiny dots of brash color intensify racial imagery

Peter Williams’ pointillist painting technique, crowding thousands of tiny dots of enamel color within pencil-drawn contours of people, places and things, is not the same as the celebrated one pioneered more than a century ago by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. His look yields a very different feel from the measured, careful tone of those French Postimpressionists.

Brash color is plainly important to the 14 Williams paintings in his Los Angeles debut at Luis De Jesus Gallery, most of which explode with pointillist dots. Rather than the scientifically inf lected approach of letting pure hues painted on a canvas mix only when they reach an observer’s eye, the Delawarebased artist, 66, uses staccato dots in an almost ritual way.

Fixated, determined, relentless — those are the descriptors for the pointillism of big, roiling, undulating crowd scenes in works like “Wild Thing, I Think I Love You” and “A Foolish Trick.” A gallery handout also connects the dots to Australian aboriginal art and African scarification patterns. Whatever the sources, the painter’s steadfast focus drives the viewer’s.

In the latter work, a rider mounted on horseback, ancient symbol of heroic triumph, is impossibly balanced on a tightrope before a staring, wide-eyed throng. The rider stands precariously on a variation of a Pan-African f lag, a white mask worn over his black face. The foolishness of the balancing trick is transformed into trenchant racial spectacle.

Williams also deftly layers imagery, as in “West Ward and East Ward, Neither at Least.” A uniformed man and an extravagant tree of life — a topsy-turvy house entangled in its branches — are cargo for a boatful of women guiding the vessel across choppy water.

George Washington crossing the Del-

aware mixes with the Middle Passage of slave ships, all while conjuring the prehistoric river goddess Styx, deity of the hellish underworld. Thousands of dots and brightly colored patterns stitch them (and us) together.

Elsewhere, those persistent dots and their colorful capacity for exuberant intensity enliven a marvelous portrait of Rep. Maxine Waters, arms spread wide, eyes glistening and a broad smile across her face. Williams explodes the little dots too, enlarging the marks into the big red, white and blue balloons of a boisterous political rally. As it does for several other portraits of women (actress Pam Grier, activist Patricia Okoumou) that he collectively titles “Queens,” the obstinate pointillist technique is transformed into an unmistakable manifestation of the subject’s committed character.

Luis De Jesus Gallery, 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City. Through Dec. 15; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 838-6000, luisdejesus.com among the visual sources. The distinctive technique, a savvy distancing device, invokes rich histories. A tragicomic mask can ricochet between ancient Greek theater, classical Kabuki drama and modern Mexican rituals of Day of the Dead.

The style is also wonderfully weird, as when the simple pinstripe of a photographed business suit turns out to be painted on, just like the wood grain of a ladder or chair in a couple of the sculptures. No one would mistake the painted president for a faithful likeness of the real person. All the world becomes a stage and Harry Truman, the Everyman President, just another player. (The artists too.) The Kelleys’ epic is humanized.

Strangely poignant, the video burlesque of life inside the submarine is difficult to follow — I’d guess intentionally so. (Patrick shot the narrative, Mary Reid played all but one of the parts.) Titled “In the Body of the Sturgeon,” the World War II story is set inside an underwater vessel not launched until the 1960s, long after Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Japan and the Pacific war ended — but the Cuban missile crisis was fresh.

The tale is loosely reimagined from “The Song of Hiawatha,” Longfellow’s 19th century Romantic fantasy of Native America. But it seems less about specific details of history than it is the incarnation of a crazed atmosphere of containment, madness and loss. Foundational mythologies deserve no less, and the Kelleys wield their aesthetic scissors to cut them up with rambunctious glee.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Through Dec. 15; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 837-2117, vielmetter.com

Luis De Jesus Gallery “A FOOLISH TRICK,” painted in 2018 by Peter Williams, features the bright color, pointillist technique and undulating crowd found in much of his recent work.

Craft & Folk Art Museum MERION ESTES applies her sumptuous melding of acrylic painting and fabric collage to the prospect of environmental collapse in the exhibit “Unnatural Disasters.”

Robert Wedemeyer Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects “GAUDY NIGHT,” done by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley in 2017, is a photograph on a light box.