Like an ominous dream

Paintings with a fuzzy, blissed-out, sun-bleached look have a venerable contemporary history, beginning with Vija Celmins and Gerhard Richter in the 1960s, continuing with Ellen Phelan in the 1980s and then on to Luc Tuymans more recently. Now, among others, add young Beijing painter Song Kun to the accomplished roster.

At Walter Maciel Gallery, Song is showing 20 oil paintings made since 2008. All horizontal, all 18 inches high and 24 inches wide, they include a few single-panel works and one triptych; most are diptychs.

Some, like “The Deer City I & II,” show different views of the same subject -- in this case a mountainous landscape with a pure white deer that is so sleek, smooth and statuesque that it appears to be, well, a statue. Others shift the view completely from one panel to the next. A mysterious landscape is next to a close-up of a man who has fallen asleep on the bus, or a dark nighttime view of Shanghai abuts an unidentified pagoda in silhouette.

The effect is dreamlike and vaguely ominous. It encourages close scrutiny of disjointed vistas that refuse to coalesce and fully disclose themselves. Song paints in grays, whites and sepia tones, with only hints of lifelike color rising from the surface, like a vision emerging from fog. A sense of unrelieved estrangement separates the artist (and the viewer) from the quotidian world recorded in the pictures.

Song showed a painting series called “It’s My Life “(2005-06) at the UCLA Hammer Museum two years ago, her American solo debut. Every day for a year she made one small painting as a kind of visual diary of whatever was on her mind, filtered through traditional Chinese and European painterly motifs. But the Hammer selection felt blase and apathetic.

The new work doesn’t. Nowhere is it more engaged than in the triptych, where panels show views of a rock band playing on a club’s stage, fronted by a young female singer. In the lower left quadrant of each, illuminated by stage lights that blare into your eyes, a uniformed soldier or policeman is seen from behind, watching.

Song keeps shifting our point of view on the club action, but it’s the official watching the woman who seems to be the work’s true subject. Whether a performer being checked out by an unexpected fan, a symbol of youthful rebellion under the watchful eye of a representative of government control or perhaps art being metaphorically monitored by shadowy proscriptions, the triptych mesmerizes. The show is Song’s U.S. gallery debut and represents a big step forward.

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Walter Maciel Gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-1840, through Oct. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.waltermacielgallery.com

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Creations from decaying matter

Constance Mallinson’s recent works are painted in oils on plywood or paper, which makes material sense. Plywood and paper are engineered products assembled from natural substances such as wood veneers and cellulose fibers, while the paintings’ subject focuses on the industrial degradation of nature -- especially trees. “Severed Limbs,” for example, is a still life composed from chopped-up tree limbs and twigs, a surprisingly gruesome array of decaying matter that restores some of the deathly quality of the original French term for still life -- nature morte.

Given the way things are going environmentally these days, all of nature appears headed for the grave. “Severed Limbs” does double duty as beautifully rendered naturalistic painting and as the depiction of a mass tomb.

For the latest installment of the project series at Pomona College Museum of Art, curator Rebecca McGrew has assembled five paintings whose life-size imagery is rendered as trompe l’oeil grotesques. Unlike Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous Baroque portraits made from flowers, fruits, vegetables and fish, Mallinson’s pictures show desiccated bodies cobbled together from tree stumps and crumbling leaves.

Rather than portraiture, though, her pictures recall older paintings -- Manet’s 1863 nude “Olympia,” a confrontational opening salvo in the history of Modern art, or various Germanic renditions of Adam and Eve and Christian saints. Creepy and compelling, the imagery suggests the way in which we project ourselves on conceptions of nature, creating the natural world even as we go about assuring its destruction.

Adam and Eve may have been ejected from Eden, but here they are literally composed of dying elements of the garden that was denied them. And the popular 19th century dismissal of Manet’s “Olympia,” a riveting picture of a Parisian prostitute, as vulgar and immoral takes on a slightly different tone when cast as an image of ecological collapse.

Mallinson has been painting savvy landscapes for more than 25 years, beginning with vistas assembled from postcards, advertisements and calendars. These sobering new works are among her most accomplished.

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Pomona College Museum of Art, 333 N. College Way, Claremont, (909) 621-8283, through Oct. 18. Closed Mondays. www.pomona.edu//museum

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Filtering Iranian sensibilities

Cultural dislocation is, if not the norm, then certainly a prominent thread that runs through the art of the last tumultuous century. “Traces of Being: Iran in the Passage of Memories” brings together mixed-media and installation works by four American artists of Iranian descent. The show at Morono Kiang Gallery was organized by Shervin Shahbazi, who left Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution.

Layered imagery is the most common strategy the artists employ to evoke the phantoms of memory that dart through current lived experience. Hushidar Mortezaie dresses cutout plywood figures in elaborate costumes that mix Middle Eastern tradition with Western popular culture, like globalized paper dolls. In ethereal watercolors and drawings, Pantea Karimi merges hand-written Persian calligraphy, an ancient form, with iconic media imagery, including oil company logos and satellite-communication towers.

For “Houri,” Amitis Motevalli lines up seven irregular rows of photographic transparencies on the gallery’s front window. Light streams through to illuminate the same haunting image over and over, 72 times -- a teenage self-portrait, which disturbingly melds a publicity-style head shot of a wanna-be pop star with the false Western myth of Middle Eastern martyrs being greeted by virgins in paradise.

The most compelling piece is an untitled installation by Fereshteh Toosi, which colonizes one corner of the main room. Large foam spheres are draped with knitted and elaborately decorated afghan blankets -- afghan being a term for a middle-class North American craft that has little if anything to do with the nation where U.S. troops are currently engaged in battle.

Toosi emphasizes the wild dislocation by deploying the spheres as a loopy interplanetary model. These exotic homemade “worlds” spin around beneath a “starry night” composed from Mexican “God’s eyes” of colorful twisted yarn, hanging on the walls above. Mashing together Middle Eastern, American and Mexican motifs in a playfully out-of-this-world manner, the installation throws its lot in with the saving grace offered by the inventive wonders of inexplicable mystery.

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Morono Kiang Gallery, 218 W. 3rd St., (213) 628-8208, through Nov. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.moronokiang .com

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Eyes glide over vibrant colors

Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978) was among the most influential painters in mid-20th century L.A., but his reputation has lagged since his death. Perhaps because bright, chromatic abstraction has again become popular with a generation of younger artists, a show of 15 sophisticated abstract paintings from about the last dozen years of his life feels remarkably fresh.

At Louis Stern Fine Arts, Feitelson’s late paintings play the strict, rectilinear geometry of the mostly square canvases against the fluid curves of their interior drawing. Color is flat. The lines swell and gently undulate, changing thickness as they go.

Sometimes the lines seem to split open to admit narrow color-shapes within them. One result is a sense of nicely mind-bending confusion: When does a line become a shape, and when does the juxtaposition of shapes blossom into the shifting illusion of optical space?

In graphic design, the colloquial term for lines that come together and just barely (or don’t quite) touch is “to kiss.” Feitelson’s sensuous abstract curves likewise possess an inescapably titillating charge.

Some Feitelson paintings (although none in this show) harness distinctive color juxtapositions like red and green or orange and blue to create an optical spark. Two small works -- many of the rest are 5 feet square -- from 1976 even fuse shapes that are phallic and vulval. But the sparks set off in Feitelson’s abstractions are also reminiscent of more generalized ideas of creation, like the one implied between the nearly touching fingers of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Hard-edge abstract painting doesn’t often feel literary. (In an insightful catalog essay published with the show, art historian Frances Colpitt discusses Feitelson as an Expressionist painter.) What’s most compelling about the best of these, however, is the way they refuse to let your eye rest anywhere within the painted field. In Feitelson’s strongest work, perceptual pleasure is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

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Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-0147, to Dec. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.louissternfinearts.com

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christopher.knight@latimes .com