Works’ Mysterious Beauty Engages Mind, Heart

As soft as a whisper and as strong as a brick house, Ellen Phelan’s new still lifes and landscapes rank among the best she has made. They are also some of the best paintings being made today.

Described in words, any one of Phelan’s seemingly out-of-focus pictures of peonies, tulips, roses and trees at Patricia Faure Gallery sounds as if it’s nothing more than an enlarged version of a sappy greeting card--one whose sentiments are doubtlessly sincere, but whose standardized imagery falls far short of conveying its intensity. Of the 12 paintings displayed, 10 depict vases of flowers set on shelves, window sills and desks; the other two outline silhouettes of leafless trees, as if seen through a thick mist.

But Phelan’s skilled paint handling and her sharply honed knowledge of just when enough is enough allow her to infuse such cliched subject matter with so much mysterious force that even cynical viewers will be moved by the work’s beauty. Seemingly simple, her paintings are extraordinarily sophisticated in their capacity to capture the materiality of light, giving this ordinarily intangible substance a presence both palpable and wondrous.

Superficially, Phelan’s works on paper and canvas resemble Gerhard Richter’s blurred paintings of public events and Vija Celmins’ deadpan depictions of common objects found in her studio. But unlike Richter and Celmins, whose cool art describes the world from a distance, as if filtered through the lens of a camera, Phelan is not interested in the ways photography mediates our perceptions or alters our views of the world.

The light that suffuses her consummately crafted pictures is no different from the real thing. Reflected and refracted by the world’s textures, it enters your eyes with indescribable delicacy, subtly shifting as you move closer and look from different angles. Neither detached nor chilly, these paintings are amazingly intimate documents of careful looking, when absolute attentiveness is its own reward.

Quietly dazzling in their atmospheric splendor, some of Phelan’s watercolors and gouaches have the impact of much larger Light and Space installations. Others flirt with memories of faded sepia-toned photographs, but are too rich, sensuous and filled with swift, flick-of-the-wrist highlights to be mistaken for even the most meticulously printed image. Her still lifes in oil on linen have the singularity of portraits, giving thin air the fleshy presence of warmblooded bodies.

To drive home the notion that her paintings are about the ways light falls on objects and reflects off them, Phelan has cut a small, arch-shaped opening in the center of her largest landscape. A literal window in the image, this opening demonstrates that her paintings are not windows onto some idealized world, but are multilayered objects that occupy the same space we do.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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True to His Code: Art world memories are notoriously short, so it’s refreshing to see the exhibition at Cirrus Gallery of works on paper by Guy de Cointet. A Frenchman who moved to Los Angeles in 1970, this first-generation Conceptual artist published provocatively incomprehensible books, hired professional actors for his equally enigmatic performances and made language-based works that influenced a generation of L.A.-based artists, whose careers met with more widespread success than his own.

In 1983, De Cointet died of hepatitis and his often ephemeral works all but disappeared from public view. The fact that the artist is gone adds another level of mystery to his already riddle-wrapped art. A deep streak of secrecy runs through all of De Cointet’s playfully impenetrable works, which consistently resemble complex codes and encrypted symbols, some of which can be deciphered by amateur cryptologists and others that appear to require the time, patience and passion of professionals.

In either case, De Cointet’s series of drawings made up of fragmented letter-like symbols, zigzagging lines and abstract logos suggest that the world abounds with so many multiple meanings that the very idea of meaninglessness is ridiculous. Given this state of affairs, art cannot possibly mean too little--provided, of course, that a viewer’s methods of “reading” it are sufficiently adept and flexible.

You don’t have to be a modern mathematician or old-fashioned spy to enjoy translating De Cointet’s diagrammatic images. One body of work consists of neat rows, columns and blocks of elegant script that look vaguely Arabic. Set amid floating yellow stars, pink diamonds, red ellipses, black hatchets and strange abstract shapes, these flowing words are actually written in English. It’s just hard to read them because they’re always written backward, upside-down or sideways. Bring a hand-held mirror if you want to read their fantastic anthropological stories without getting a headache.

Other meticulously ruled drawings look like mutant corporate logos that seem to repeat themselves by flipping upside-down and laterally to form mirrored modules at once stylized, descriptive, concrete and poetic. Based on an invisible grid, another series consists of brightly colored diagonal lines that resemble a vigorously scrambled alphabet. These dizzying labyrinths give physical shape and hands-on immediacy to the idea of being lost in thought or thoroughly confused--unable to see the forest for the trees.

A pair of pages from one of De Cointet’s handwritten books appear to be covered with a cross between Morse code and Braille. It looks nonsensical until you learn that the text’s index provides the code and each symmetrical glyph invented by the Frenchman corresponds to a letter that, accompanied by its neighbors, spells out a story in English.

Well before language games became an art-world staple, De Cointet played them with verve and humor. Combining a characteristically French love of linguistics with the American idea that all art is a form of public address, his crisp Pop Conceptualism still reads well today. With any luck, it will find more viewers in the future.

* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through March 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Thoughts on Paper: Michelle Fierro’s second L.A. solo show consists of a dozen densely clustered drawings that share very little with the critically acclaimed paintings she showed 2 1/2 years ago. Smaller, filled with more types of mark-making and more marks per square inch, these compressed works on paper are not preparatory studies for larger canvases but fully resolved abstractions that follow a logic all their own.

The young artist’s abstract paintings never put a priority on the authenticity of her hand’s “touch,” nor treat the blank canvas as a ground for inimitable, self-defining gestures. Likewise, Fierro’s new drawings at Works on Paper Inc. reveal less about manual dexterity than mental facility. Conceptually rigorous, these seemingly lackadaisical abstractions outline a way of thinking in which compositions are formed intuitively and improvisationally--as little bits of pigment, tiny spills of ink and torn scraps of paper come together to describe serendipitous incidents that add up to coherent wholes.

At first glance, Fierro’s medium-size drawings look as if a child could have made them. Many are not centered on the page, filling only one-quarter or one-third of a pristine surface. Even those that are located in the center seem to peter out before they get to the edges, giving their shapes an unanchored weightlessness suggestive of purely imaginary spaces.

Every compositional element appears to have been swiftly scribbled, rapidly shaded or urgently filled in with pencil, ink and a variety of marking pens. Awkwardly drawn outlines and crudely crayoned silhouettes bespeak a child’s capacity to see a lot more than meets the eye of an adult. Congealed globs of glue, frayed bits of fabric and fragmented collages add to the mix-and-match feel of Fierro’s ad hoc abstractions.

To step back from these seemingly slapdash works is to see that their small-scale details are less chaotic than they appear up close. A little distance is all that’s required to realize that Fierro’s abstractions draw your eye around their fluid compositions in the same way that traditional images guide your gaze. Emphasizing the activity of looking, rather than the process of their construction, these drawings downplay specific narratives to let viewers make up their own.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 964-9675, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Buoyant Charm: Filled with promise, ambition and quite a bit of facility, Nina Bovasso’s first solo show in Los Angeles is a frolicsome affair made up of more than 90 paintings on paper. Although the young artist’s Guston-inspired images wear their art-historical references on their sleeves, they rarely get bogged down pretending to shoulder the weight of recent art history. Lighter and less tormented than Guston’s seething stews of futility, these softly tinted pictures owe more to Saturday-morning cartoons than to art-historical precedents, even ones inspired by 1950s comic strips.

When bad things happen in cartoons, they never have lasting results. At Richard Heller Gallery, Bovasso’s whimsical pictures are animated by a similar sense of charmed levity.

This isn’t to suggest that the New York-based artist’s often pattern-filled pictures are lightweight or silly. Many resemble outer-space views of Earth, which appears to be a lumpy clump of matter overrun by crowded freeways and choked by clouds of pollution. Erupting pustules, hairy bumps and other protrusions cover much of its surface.

But the energy of Bovasso’s decisive lines and the buoyancy of her cheerful palette combine to make the potentially disgusting side of her art not only palatable but downright attractive. Deep blue lakes, snowy hillsides and simple little towns occasionally pop up in her compositions, adding to their fairy-tale character.

Titled “Lumpen Grumpus,” many images are driven by Dr. Seuss goofiness. The world depicted in Bovasso’s playful works is one in which deep-rooted enthusiasm has the power to overcome even the most daunting obstacles. At its best, that’s what art always does--even when it’s not as much fun as Bovasso’s.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.