Karlsson Rixon’s Photos Have a Close Brush With Painting

Many of the most interesting photographs being made today owe a considerable debt to painting. This marks a significant change from only a few years ago, when a lot of artists used cameras and film to criticize the follies and shortcomings of oils on canvas.

Photography’s newfound love affair with such old-fashioned tools as brushes and palettes probably has something to do with the fact that digital imagery is beginning to replace lens-based pictures. Traditional forms of photography, no longer the new kid on the block, are starting to be explored for the similarities they share with painting.

At Angles Gallery, Annica Karlsson Rixon’s monochrome photographs have one foot firmly planted in the world of Minimalist abstraction and the other in that of popular culture. Each easel-size C-print, mounted on a rigid plastic panel that is not covered with glass, is a close-up of a section of a recently polished truck’s cab.

These seemingly uniform squares of watery blue, forest green, cherry red and bright orange gradually reveal mysterious shapes reflected in their shiny surfaces. Vaporous clouds, blurry horizon lines and shadowy silhouettes of rearview mirrors have the presence of ghostly apparitions in the Sweden-born, L.A.-educated artist’s work.

So does a viewer’s reflection. In the front gallery, a photograph hung opposite the entrance comes to life as it reflects the cars passing by outside.

One yellow image resembles sensuously draped fabric and echoes the highlights found in Billy Al Bengston’s “dentos,” a 1960s series of paintings on bent sheets of metal. Other works recall Maxwell Hendler’s panels of supersaturated color, with the grainy imperfections of the blown-up photographs playing off the sparkling flakes in the truck’s metallic paint.

A second series depicts the hands and arms of truckers. Recalling street scenes cataloged in the early works of John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha, Karlsson Rixon’s pictures also bring to mind tightly cropped details of Renaissance paintings. Her disembodied fragments of men’s anatomy are remarkably evocative, even intimate, especially since they were captured in a split second, as two vehicles sped alongside one another.

As a group, Karlsson Rixon’s images suggest that painting and photography have more in common than is usually assumed. They demonstrate that if you look at the world in the right frame of mind, you’ll see painterly effects in unexpected places.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Aug. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Information Society: Although not many people believe that information processing and thinking are the same thing--and even fewer treat art as nothing but information--Guy Limone’s clever works suggest that not knowing the differences among the three sometimes results in productive confusion. At Kohn Turner Gallery, the French artist’s vast arrays of slide-size photographs and model-train-scale miniatures invite viewers to meditate on the moments when info gives way to thought, which sometimes becomes artistry.

Limone’s works fall into three groups, each of which occupies a step in the process. Consisting of hundreds or thousands of color-coordinated image fragments clipped from magazines, “The Dark Blue Collection” and “Red Tapestry” present overwhelming amounts of raw data--in the same way as do Internet searches with broadly defined parameters.

Organized by location, “Colors of the Philippines,” “Colors of New York (brown)” and “Colors of Marseilles” are more focused in the information they deliver. Each is an 8-foot-long fluorescent tube to which Limone has affixed dozens of colorful snapshots not much bigger than a square-inch each. Like elongated light-boxes on which a graphic designer has laid out slides to be considered for a client’s tourist brochure, these slight works use snippets of information to tantalize, whetting a viewer’s appetite for travel, knowledge or tidy summaries.

The most complex works are made of hand-painted plastic figurines Limone has arranged to give physical form to disembodied abstractions. “Density of California” encloses eight 1/160th-scale people in a nearly 7-by-7-foot square on the wall, outlining the ratio of Californians to acres of the state. Another piece includes 1,000 slightly larger figures--standing, sitting, skiing, working and whatnot--on a narrow 16-foot-long ledge. Painted blue or red, each tiny person represents the percentage of Americans with Internet addresses.

Paradoxically, the most intriguing sculpture is the least illustrative. Titled “46% of French Internet users are satisfied with the web,” this circle of wall-mounted figures presents no conclusions. Rather than conveying a neat tidbit of info, it lures viewers into an imaginary world, where 350 tiny people are carrying on--for no other reason than to let our imaginations play.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Aug. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The Road Home: Like indoor-outdoor carpeting, Danny Shain’s abstract paintings adapt to their surroundings while never letting you forget the other situations in which they also function effectively. Made of four, five or six panels of various dimensions, these regular yet asymmetrical arrangements of muted colors remain true to their sources in tiled flooring and city streets.

Of Shain’s four paintings at Sandroni Rey Gallery, the two mid-size ones--measuring 6-by-4 feet--maintain the most satisfying balance between structural stability and visual mobility. Each consists of three large and three small wood panels that have been paired to form three distinct units. Standing upright, upside-down and lying sideways, these units form the building blocks of a pattern that could easily extend well beyond the gallery’s walls.

Rugged, mundane colors make up Shain’s palette, which tends toward the grays of faded asphalt and old concrete, but includes such accents as ochre, earth brown and tarry black. All of the L.A.-based artist’s panels have been coated with richly textured layers of acrylic paint mixed with Fixall, a material house painters use to fill holes and repair imperfections in walls.

A good-enough-to-get-the-job-done quality suffuses Shain’s unpretentious paintings. Neither provocative nor flashy, they celebrate pedestrian virtues that don’t make the headlines but provide everyday life with much of its texture and resonance.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Aug. 28. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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Graduation Day: “Remaining Speculations” is a coherent group show that features the work of five recent graduates from local master’s of fine arts programs. Consisting of provisional sculptures, snapshot-like photographs and projected slides, the hit-and-miss exhibition at 962 Chung King Road suggests that reality is as elusive as any fleeting illusion--and a lot harder to come by than most types of Realism presume.

Taking their cues from movies, Stefan Zucker’s nighttime photos of Torrance oil refineries shroud industrial ugliness in the romance of twinkling lights. Similarly, his images of abandoned East Berlin embassies and L.A. houses wrapped in fumigation tarps make unremarkable buildings look like odd props for theatrical productions.

Taking their cues from TV game shows, Michael Queenland’s photographs of L.A.’s downtown skyline include a young man in the foreground. Holding a big rectangle of colored cardboard over his head, he functions as a low-budget TelePrompTer, striving to incite a collective response from disparate viewers.

Doreen Morrissey’s free-standing sculptures downplay illusionistic tricks by laying bare their simple armatures. In contrast, Alice Konitz’s flimsy Styrofoam awning and fake logs made of mirrored Plexiglas rely entirely on their surfaces, where the dazzle of artificiality outdistances the grit of material integrity.

Taking their cues from advertising, Josh Blackwell’s juxtapositions of objects and images cast these categorical differences as two sides of the same coin. One series consists of ordinary shoes stuffed into homemade bags on which he has painted the shoes’ portraits. Another piece consists of a checkered curtain, likewise stuffed into a bunch of handmade wrappers on which he has painted a similar pattern. Among the most promising works in the show, Blackwell’s multilayered objects demonstrate that reality comes in all shapes and sizes and is rarely contained by a single style of representation.

* 962 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-2810, through Aug. 8. Closed Mondays-Wednesdays.