Conflict and intrigue grow

A strange and marvelous three-channel video installation by New York artist Irit Batsry pits a dislocated scene of a seemingly exotic event against the routine experience of looking at art. The result is a subtle disorientation that is at once vaguely tribal and spiritually provocative.

The side walls of the darkened main room at Shoshana Wayne Gallery are washed with a pair of projections. They require a bit of description.

At the left, “Wave Breaker” focuses on a rocky shoreline. The time appears to be dawn or dusk, and buildings at the margins of the scene suggest an urban locale. The shallow but steadily lapping waves chip away at the encroachments of civilization.

At the right, “Vanishing Line” shows what appears to be a nighttime encampment and menacing fence, along which shadowy figures move. As a gallery visitor walks around the space, his actual shadow gets tangled up with the illusory ones. When a projected shadow suddenly darts into view, it’s a loosely threatening surprise, like encountering an unexpected stranger at night.

Batsry has positioned the two video projectors at an angle close to the walls, with the projected images filtered through small, upright Plexiglas panels. The result is steeply raked images on the side walls, emphasizing their physical qualities as projections and distorting the scenes.

On the end wall the raked images straighten out and overlap, reflected off the Plexiglas panels; a coastal boulder seamlessly merges with a cinder-block building, nature fusing with culture into a virtual reality.

There’s more. On the floor in the center of the room, a third projection on a small, free-standing screen shows young beach-side fire-twirlers, their flaming bolos creating blurs of white light that starkly illuminate milling crowds. An audio background features drummers, muffled crowd noises and occasional whoops and hollers.

The scene is like something out of Goya. But the wild and inexplicable ritual performance unfolds within a gallery space created between a looming fence and an indifferent sea. It takes a while to get absorbed by Batsry’s confection, but as the manifest contradictions grow -- fun and fear, release and confinement, document and fiction, nature and culture, depiction and actuality -- they build into a compelling experience.

“Beach at Nightfall” was shot at the so-called Drummer’s Beach in Tel Aviv, a hangout for local kids and itinerant young backpackers who gather on Friday nights for a free-floating festival with no particular purpose, save social interaction. Batsry’s installation was first shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, in a coastal town just north of Tel Aviv. (This is its U.S. debut.) Both are wedged between the Mediterranean Sea and the West Bank, with its proliferation of conflicted Jewish settlements.

It’s easy to read the unvarnished contradictions of “Beach at Nightfall” in geopolitical terms. Formally, it is also powerful -- a flickering video “fire twirler” for the gatherings of the contemporary art world, in which galleries and museums are their own tribal versions of Drummer’s Beach.

In a side gallery, Batsry shows a group of four less successful, large-scale color photographs. Their subject is yellow caution tape, the kind one finds at a construction site or a crime scene, which the artist configures into elaborate loops or tosses into the breeze. Catching the light and sometimes shimmering with a spectral glow, the tape is transformed from a utilitarian warning into a fanciful abstraction. But the effect is strained and monotonous, especially after the delirious seductions of “Beach at Nightfall.”

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Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 28. Closed Sunday and Monday. www .shoshanawayne.com

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Fluent in the language of paint

The 14 works in Hawaii-based artist Tom Lieber’s lovely show at Craig Krull Gallery are virtuoso displays of paint-handling. The smallest canvas is barely 8 by 10 inches, while the largest is almost 4 feet square. In either case, Lieber manipulates paint so that it seems to have a life of its own.

Each painting is divided into two color zones, upper and lower, one darker and the other lighter. The zones are visually soft and layered, with under-painting showing through. The paint application is less gestural than atmospheric, like fog banks of shifting color slipping over a landscape.

Between them, a small storm of meandering, linear paint strokes in multiple, contrasting colors negotiates a transition. Narrow brushes appear to have been rolled between thumb and forefinger or else moved across the surface the way a planchette slides across a Ouija board.

A kind of automatic drawing, these linear tangles make no claim to subconscious revelation, the way Surrealist automatism did. Instead, using only the language of paint, they play with the membranes separating presence and absence, here and there or being and nothingness. It’s like the apparent contradiction inherent in inertia, which is a condition of matter either at permanent rest or moving at a stable velocity along a straight line.

Also at Craig Krull, Stephen Aldrich shows a group of dense black-and-white collages made from cut-up engravings. Aldrich wields an X-Acto knife like a pencil, slicing the detailed contours of people, places and things that have already been rendered as works of art once before. He recombines them, often by category -- animals, architecture, 19th century genre scenes, machinery, etc. -- and art begets art.

The technique is familiar from earlier artists such as San Francisco’s Jess Collins (1923-2004) and Arizona’s Frederick Sommer (1905-99). Aldrich worked as Sommer’s studio assistant for many years, and he still lives in Prescott, Ariz. His collages are less Surrealist in tone and feeling than those of Jess or Sommer, but like theirs, his rely on a fantasist’s fondness for imagination as reality’s ultimate expression.

In the show, most of Aldrich’s collages are assembled on a geometric armature. Most common is the two-dimensional grid -- fragments of organic seascapes and landscapes subjected to neat, orderly rows of rectangular cutouts (“A Fractal Aspect”), for example, or gesticulating figures inserted into theatrical prosceniums (“All the World’s a Stage”). Others curve like orbiting satellites (“Aphelion”), spiral endlessly (“Jerusalem”) or are spatially woven like a tapestry (“Eldorado”).

One of the most beautiful exploits stuttering repetition, with multiple copies of fragments of Albrecht Durer’s famous 1513 engraving “Knight, Death and the Devil” fanned out across the sheet like a deck of cards. Titled “The Art of the Fugue,” it assembles a variety of Germanic religious and mythological images into a complex, contrapuntal visual form. Aldrich arrays these images across an architectural facade, like a private fever dream enshrined as a public mural.

That tension between personal imagination and public construction finds its apogee in “America,” a spectacle of machinery, pistons, flywheels, tractor engines and locomotives. Given the machine-production of engravings, the work doubles as an embodiment of what it depicts. This America is both chillingly beautiful and coldly sinister, fantastically inventive and inescapably threatening. Aldrich locates the contradiction in our Victorian-era past, which created the environment we inhabit today.

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Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.craig krullgallery.com

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Thoughtful, but from a remove

Fifteen recent drawings by Juliao Sarmento are cool, elegant, cerebral and remote. The cerebral part is not surprising, because drawings register artistic thought. The remoteness, however, is odd, because drawing is also usually a means for thought’s most direct and unencumbered expression. But Sarmento turns the tables.

For quite some time, the Lisbon-born artist has been doing something similar with his painting, in which dense graphite images emerge from thick impasto in a reversal of the normal sequence. At Christopher Grimes Gallery, drawings large and, somewhat less successfully, small, engage in a laborious process of revelation and concealment.

Sarmento begins with a heavy sheet of paper, usually with at least one ragged edge that underscores its materiality. The sheet gets squared off at the margins with pencil lines and masking tape, since removed; they contain the visual field, except where the water-based enamel paint applied to the surface drips down over the bottom edge.

Those color fields -- usually indigo, rust or dark gray -- are washed in lighter tones of white or cream. Out of that rich, loamy pictorial soil grow three types of images: thickly rendered graphite drawings or black-and-white photographs of a lily, amaryllis, orchid or other plant; architectural renderings, whether a floor plan or a facade; and female bodies (all are faceless). If the woman’s hands are shown, she may cup a breast, cover her pudenda or let them simply hang at her side.

Like his paintings, Sarmento’s drawings have an internalized, almost claustrophobic feeling, in which the work of art is a sensuous, poignant and self-contained universe where anything is possible -- except escape. The larger drawings may be more successful because, paradoxically, they are less cluttered. Their openness serves to make the limits imposed by the sheet all the more perturbing.

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Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cgrimes.com

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christopher.knight@latimes.com