Abstract shapes balanced and quirky

The derring-do that viewers often associate with avant-garde art is nowhere to be found in Helen Lundeberg’s handsomely composed pictures. They flirt with abstraction but never give themselves over to its uncertainties, preferring, instead, to stick to depicting the visible world. Such have-it-both-ways balance is usually a recipe for blandness. But Lundeberg (1908-99) made it engaging -- not quite exciting, but filled with enough quirky kicks that her tasteful, often serene paintings still deliver the lasting satisfactions they set out to.

At Louis Stern Fine Arts, “Infinite Distance: Architectural Compositions by Helen Lundeberg” includes a substantial percentage of highlights among its 21 works as it deftly surveys the L.A. painter’s career. The earliest works, from 1943 and 1946, are note-card-size landscapes with a whisper of Surrealism drifting though their simple setups, which resemble open-air stage sets. Think Giorgio de Chirico goes to the beach and is enchanted by the expansiveness.

Lundeberg’s next paintings feature split compositions, the simplest divided right down the middle, with a schematic still life or interior on the left and a landscape or exterior on the right. Some of these, such as “Silent Interior” from 1952 and its larger, 4-by-5-foot reworking from 1959, are among Lundeberg’s boldest.

In the 1960s, Lundeberg settled on the format she would explore for the rest of her career: the permeable boundary between interior and exterior, as it often takes shape in the architecture of Southern California. Windows, doorways, porches, colonnades, arches and corridors, as well as picture frames, mirrors and bridges, appear in nearly all of her stylized compositions.

The basic shapes in Lundeberg’s paintings recall early 20th century Modernist photography, particularly the strand that focused on the abstract configurations of the urban environment. “Interior With Table,” “Interior With Mirror,” “Shadow of the Bridge I” and “Evening View” appear to be simple arrangements of straight and curved lines until you read their titles and see the objects and spaces Lundeberg’s shapes describe.

The best paintings create spaces that cannot be so easily tracked back to the visible world. Nearly 8 feet long, “Arches 5” is the largest work in the show, the most rhythmic and the most dynamic. Its visual ambiguities give rise to pleasurably jarring shifts. Other paintings appear to depict upside-down archways that Lundeberg has superimposed atop one another, playing up the subtle color shifts that are her specialty.

Two 5-foot-square paintings, “Untitled (Looking Through Series)” and “Kurigalzu’s Arch,” stand out for their bilateral symmetry. More iconic than Lundeberg’s signature works, their blunt forms contrast dramatically with the delicacy of her other images, whose muted tertiary tints soften their hard-edge compositions to reveal that they are as much about atmosphere as about architecture.

Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, through Aug. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.louissternfinearts.com

From broken bits of surfboards

Jesse Simon’s low-relief sculptures take viewers back to the 1960s, when the sleek shapes, synthetic materials and glossy finishes of surfboards inspired a generation of L.A. artists to make works both laid-back and flashy. This trip down memory lane is just the beginning. At once primitive and futuristic, Simon’s savvy works travel far beyond the Finish Fetish precedents they respectfully acknowledge.

Made from surfboards snapped in half or smashed to bits by the sea’s pounding waves, Simon’s nine cobbled-together, multipart wall sculptures at the Patricia Faure Gallery are DIY hybrids that mix and mangle metaphors with the freewheeling precision of Beat poetry. Think of this L.A. artist as a beach Beat, a connoisseur of surf detritus and, more important, of the far-flung stories that such cast-off stuff suggests.

Long, lazy afternoons spent combing the shore are evoked by Simon’s sculptures. Their smooth surfaces and irregularly faceted segments recall shells and bits of broken glass that have been rendered smooth and opaque by the churning surf. The smallest two, “Last Can of Urgent Care” and “Tempted by the Mini,” look like volleyball-size chunks of rose- and turquoise-tinted coral. “Pharmassist” is a boogie-board-size slab of purple, an abstract landscape suffused with a hint of mystery -- and more than a hint of damage.

Simon cuts broken surfboards into manageable chunks, skins away their protective resin exteriors and then carves and sands their foam interiors until the results fit together like the gigantic stones of ancient Inca fortresses. He also cuts cross-sections of the boards’ fiberglass fins and wood armatures, setting both in the foam chunks to create schematic images of curling waves, buoys or an old-timer scanning the beach for lost treasures with a metal detector. These simple line drawings are featured in his midsized pieces, which he covers with thin layers of resin to give their surfaces the color and texture of sun-bleached bones.

The show’s centerpiece is an approximately 8-by-4-foot knockout. With the silhouette of an off-kilter shield, “Boundary Waters” combines the gemlike glossiness of Simon’s small works with the weather-beaten sheen of his white ones. The abstract emblem also calls to mind the ad hoc symmetry of crystals, the streamlined hulls of handcrafted vessels and the menace of sci-fi monsters. It isn’t difficult to imagine a cargo cult gathering around Simon’s sculpture, which seems to have washed ashore from a world more intriguing than this one.

Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through July 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.patriciafauregallery.com

Parking’s place in Americans’ lives

In a room not much larger than the average parking spot, “Pavement Paradise: American Parking Space” presents a lot of information about the places we park our cars: at home, curbside and in private and municipal lots -- for free, a few coins or big bucks.

Two slide shows in this installation at the Center for Land Use Interpretation alternate images and text, laying out pertinent facts with little fanfare. Editorializing is kept to a minimum as visitors learn that parking meters first appeared in Oklahoma City in 1935; that a staff of 30 maintains L.A.’s 40,000 meters, which generate $20 million a year (plus much more in tickets); that there are 200 million cars on the road in the U.S.; that L.A.’s largest lot is at Dodger Stadium (16,000 spaces); and that travel in most lots is counterclockwise.

The images depict houses, apartments, carports, driveways, yards, malls, parking lots, multistory structures, streets and fields. As a group, they paint a vivid portrait of modern cities by way of the places we store our vehicles.

A 12-minute video by Ryan Griffis, “Parking Public: A Brief Tour Into the Storage of Utopia,” provides a historical, economic and sociological sketch of parking’s place in the public and private lives of Americans, its effect on commerce and the complexity of city life. Quoting Sir Thomas More and contemporary urban theorists, the documentary takes a big-picture view of a seemingly incidental activity.

“Pavement Paradise” was organized by staff members Matthew Coolidge, Erik Knutzen, Ben Loescher, Steve Rowell and Sarah Simons. The matter-of-fact exhibition transforms a simple subject -- one most folks ignore -- into a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to live in an increasingly crowded world. Although there is not a single work of art on display, “Pavement Paradise” does art’s job efficiently and with significantly less to-do than usual.

Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through Aug. 31. Open Fridays through Sundays. www.clui.org

So luscious and lascivious

Ever since Surrealism introduced psychoanalytic concepts into art, expressionist abstraction has been burdened with the responsibility of exorcising the demons of the painters who made it. Norman Bluhm’s big, juicy canvases fly in the face of this Freudian fixation on trauma by putting the pleasure principle front and center. At the Manny Silverman Gallery, five exuberant oils on canvas and four joyously messy works on paper by Bluhm (1921-99) rank among the most libidinous to have come out of New York in the last 50 years.

All were made between 1977 and 1989. Each takes your eyes on a roller-coaster ride with more twists and turns than a writhing serpent and enough splashes and puddles of lusciously colored pigment to convince you that it was as much fun to make as it is to see.

“Mermaid’s Delight,” “Poseidon” and “Aegean Angel” link visual and oral gratification in their quasi-cartoon cascades of liquid deliciousness. Swollen blobs of supersaturated pastels cavort with whiplash doodles. Loosely composed around mouth-like openings, these paintings make the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lips logo look prim and proper, no match for their over-the-top embrace of giddy lasciviousness.

The pleasures that Bluhm’s paintings embody have more in common with walks on the wild side than with walks in the park. “Byzantine Angel” and “Laredo Lady” churn with turbulent verve. Their lipstick tints and velvety blacks hit you in the gut before your mind knows what to think.

Bluhm’s works on paper are somewhat more intimate but no less intense. Like his big paintings, they lay the painter’s handiwork bare without diminishing its sexy mystery.

Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through July 7. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.artnet.com/gallery/986/mannysilverman-gallery.html