Creepy, comic and very bloody visions

“Blood: Miniature Paintings of Sorrow and Fear,” the tantalizing title of Mark Ryden’s show at Earl McGrath Gallery, does what it’s supposed to do. Sounding vaguely like the tagline of a horror movie, it entices you to come see -- to venture a dip into deep, dark, primal emotions. The show is worth a trip, but don’t expect more than a shallow dip into the psychic mud puddle.

Come instead for the spectacle, for the silliness even, but not for anything as genuine as sorrow. Ryden paints small (down to 2 by 3 inches), and he paints well, and he lays it on thick. Not the paint itself, but the drama of the experience.

His little, elaborately framed paintings of saccharine-sweet girls with blood on their hands (or faces, or shoulders) hang against floor-to-ceiling curtains of red velvet. Music plays, a moody original score (by Stan Ridgeway and Petra Wexstun) that interweaves piano, electronic instruments and voice. Ryden likes to cite such heady influences as the cabala and the medieval practice of alchemy, but it looks as if he got most of his inspiration from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.

The paintings do consistently feature blood -- as sacrament, adornment and gratuitous pulse-quickener. In “Fountain,” a girl in a soft pink dress with lace trim stands primly, as if on stage at a school assembly. In her arms she cradles her own sleepy-eyed head, while her neck spurts a perfectly choreographed fountain of blood.

In “Cloven Bunny,” a similar doe-eyed girl lies on the floor, propped up on one elbow. Her other hand rests in a slick of blood issuing from the bifurcated stuffed rabbit on the floor next to her.

In another painting, a huge hand with a slit in the palm spills blood into a goblet held by a little girl. In another, a blond pixie in pajamas stares with theatrical shock at the massive head of Abraham Lincoln that has materialized on the end of her snowy white bed. “Rose” is a straightforward portrait of a girl with a red rose in her dark hair -- and blood dripping beneath her eyes like runny mascara.

An infant boy (baptized by blood) appears in one of the paintings; but otherwise, girls rule -- placid, waiflike girls with huge, widely spaced eyes, like those in the kitschy paintings of Margaret Keane. They exude innocence and a delicate, virginal femininity. Setting that kind of cliched purity against the violence of decapitation, mutilation and other implied crimes is how Ryden attempts to give his paintings a charge.

The disjunction doesn’t come off with as much of a jolt as planned, though, because both the saintly and the sullied feel so contrived, so divested of authenticity. Ryden braids sex, violence and religion together for the sensational thrill of the mix, not because he has anything profound to offer about their complex intersection. What he does offer is a creepy, comic kind of eye candy -- spiked treacle.

Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-4257, through May 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Fantasy worlds in miniature

Daniel Wiener’s new paintings at ACME are charming little follies that stretch in opposite directions -- toward both structure and chaos. On each clean white sheet of paper floats a shape painted in watercolor, wet into wet, so that the colors bleed into one another woozily. The shapes don’t suggest much in themselves, but read as spontaneous gestures left mostly to chance.

Into and around this larger primal matter, Wiener has drawn (in ink and pencil) and painted tightly controlled microcosms. In “littletriangleballs,” a Sam Francis-like blob in gold, blue and emerald sports a phallic protrusion that transforms, at its tip, into a meticulously rendered rippling surface, patterned with repeating blue and green triangles. A strand of tiny circles drops from the top of the paper down along the softly spiked edge of the painted shape and into its interior, where the spheres coalesce into highly ordered molecular clusters.

Waterfalls, strings of brightly colored beads, a receding row of cartoon eyes and a garuda, a hybrid creature of Indian myth, make appearances in the other sophisticated doodles here. Wiener, based in New York, is primarily known as a sculptor, but his two Play-Doh-like sculptures here are less enchanting than the works on paper.

Colorful extrusions and lumpy towers pressed together into mini-environments, they look like maquettes for the next Dr. Seuss film. The paintings on paper, meanwhile, expand and contract with the untrammeled rhythm of Wiener’s imagination, yearning one moment toward cosmic vastness, the next toward intricate structures and familiar-seeming landscapes. It’s a pleasure to tag along on his spirited meanderings.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-5942, through April 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Art that’s fresh from the icebox

Can what’s been put in cold storage be made to seem fresh again? Andy Warhol answered variants of that challenge deftly, coyly through his work. He took a more literal stab at it in 1969, when he was invited to curate an exhibition from the holdings of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art. Warhol took six trips to the storerooms and came out with paintings and drawings, as well as hatboxes and cases of shoes from the costume collection, Indian textiles and pottery, and broken Windsor chairs. These were installed as they had appeared in storage, so the show (which opened at Rice University and traveled) gave the impression of a museum turned inside out.

It was called “Raid the Icebox I With Andy Warhol.” Self-consciousness drove the show as it drove so many of Warhol’s efforts in paint and film and life. It was but another of his shopping trips through the inventory of American culture, a subjective jaunt cloaked in cool neutrality. With a nod to Warhol, Margo Leavin Gallery has organized its own “Raiding the Icebox” show, inviting 15 gallery artists to select pieces from the inventory to hang alongside their own works. There the similarities between the two shows end.

The current effort reads like a standard gallery group show, with a slight high-concept gloss. Concept, though, counts for a lot in the Leavin stable. There are older and newer works here by John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth, Tony Oursler, Sarah Charlesworth, Allen Ruppersberg, Barbara Bloom, Christopher Williams and many others. The show’s a melange of treasures and leftovers, a sprinkling of surprises tucked in among the familiar.

A new Gary Simmons painting, “I Wish,” stands out for its poetic evocation of desire denied. Painted in his characteristic chalkboard style -- in white letters on a gray field, smeared but still legible -- are the words, “I wish forever and ever and ever and ever ... “ continuing all the way down the canvas.

If any one piece steals the show, however, it’s a little untitled Carl Andre from 1967. Writing sideways and backward, one letter per square, Andre filled a sheet of graph paper with truisms, musings and provocations: “Now that motion moves we must find where it is moving”; “I am trapped in hair and fat but I am sharply watching.”

A few zingers tucked in among the more benign -- “We have great confidence because our nation kills well” -- declaim from one wartime to another with startling relevance. They remind us that, indeed, some of the stuff in our collective icebox feels fresh as ever.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., L.A., (310) 273-0603, through April 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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So now let’s talk about me

Beth Campbell’s sporadically engaging show at Sandroni Rey might lead you to the conclusion that the artist is self-aware, or that she’s self-absorbed, or maybe even self-obsessed. In the most compelling pieces on view, you can even identify where each state devolves into the next.

She’s been making these tragicomic charts, called “My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances,” for several years. Each is a handwritten, diagrammatic visualization of “what ifs,” beginning with a certainty -- that she is coming from New York to L.A. for this show, for instance -- and branching off into a hairy thicket of possible reactions and consequences.

One thread leads from anxiety about the show through credible interim steps to a dire end as a drug addict. Another takes her from enchantment with L.A. to residence in a dumpy Silver Lake apartment with unemployed roommates who eat all of her leftovers. Other paths take her to fame as a stand-up comedian, marriage to a surfer and a dizzying array of alternate destinations.

Campbell extrapolates wildly, and her potential futures crowd the page like so many rising wisps of smoke. As funny and absurd as she gets, though, she makes an astute point about the multiplicity of outcomes that fan out from every small choice. It’s a message both empowering and paralyzing -- a reminder to choose mindfully.

The centerpiece of Campbell’s show, a 15-minute, three-channel video projection, also addresses aspects of the multiple self, but with less humor or insight. In each section of the filmic triptych, called “Same as Me,” Campbell moves through a day, from waking to sleep.

She sports a different persona in each third (urban professional, artist, woman of the West), and each is set in a different locale; but she/they proceed in unison, stretching, eating, reading and resting all at the same time. This synchrony reinforces a commonality to the women’s lives, and the identities are too vaguely drawn to suggest anything more complex.

They appear simply as comfortably coexistent selves. All of the fears, hopes and neuroses that make up those selves are mapped out in Campbell’s “Potential Future” drawings, to far more vivid effect.

Sandroni Rey, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Saturday.