Mellow Light Clouds Photographic Images and Landscapes

Light--mostly the mellow glow of dusk--seasons the photographs of Aernout Overbeeke the way salt improves a drab meal. It enhances what is on the plate but cannot make up for the lack of more inventive spicing.

Overbeeke, a commercial photographer from the Netherlands, is having his first U.S. show at Stephen Cohen Gallery as part of the Absolut L.A. International Biennial. It’s a pleasant enough experience and beauty abounds among the 30 images, but the romanticism of the soft golden light begins to feel formulaic. The images, both in subject and composition, too often feel pedestrian rather than inspired.

Many of the pictures in this selection derive from a 1988 Dutch magazine assignment that had Overbeeke chronicle life along the Mississippi River. He shot an algae-blanketed shore in Wisconsin, where a jumble of lotus plants had broken through, and complicated the thick green surface. He aimed his camera down an avenue of boathouses in Minnesota, an odd little neighborhood of floating, barrack-like homes.

Visual quirks like these don’t come frequently enough, however. In shooting elsewhere throughout the U.S. or in Holland, Overbeeke’s rural landscapes tend to be more conventionally picturesque. His urban views are similarly uneventful, and his photographs of people in front of their homes or at leisure lack any special intimacy or insight. But, alas, nearly all of them are bathed in that delicious light, which mesmerizes, at least for a moment.

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Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 937-5525, through Sept. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Evolving Abstraction: Abstraction cannot help but have links to the tangible world, its birth mother, but not every abstractionist openly claims that parentage. Many keep their distance, loyal to the notion that their art was conceived immaculately, intellectually.

Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978) was a painter who luxuriated in the figurative roots of abstraction. His evolutionary path as an artist epitomized the process of abstraction itself: a taking away, a reduction, a stripping-down of something more detailed, dimensional and recognizable. A small lithograph from 1938 in Feitelson’s satisfying show at Patricia Faure Gallery illustrates the kind of fleshed-out launching pad from which his abstract work sprung.

It is an exquisitely sensual image of a reclining young woman fallen asleep over a book, each of its lines poetically concise and elegant. In the 1970s, toward the end of his life, Feitelson painted canvases with but a single line, an uncommonly pregnant, eloquent curve with just as much pressing physicality as the contours in that early print.

In the intervening decades, Feitelson became one of the pillars of Modern art in Southern California, together with fellow painters John McLaughlin, Helen Lundeberg (Feitelson’s wife), Frederick Hammersley and Karl Benjamin. From the rational symbolism of what Feitelson and Lundeberg called Post-Surrealism, Feitelson commenced the process of stripping down. His planar, hard-edged “Magical Space Forms” of the 1940s and ‘50s solidified his commitment to a vocabulary of stripes, angles, curves and color combinations that often evoked the natural world, while possessing an interior logic, order and harmony of their own.

The show, organized by writer and curator Michael Duncan, and accompanied by a slim, attractive catalog, contains just a dozen paintings from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s a large enough selection to mark the shifts in Feitelson’s style, but small enough to appreciate slowly and intimately the subtle beauties of each composition.

Two 1962 paintings subtitled “Boulder” evoke a Neolithic arrangement of stones, one rounded boulder balancing between two tall, more angular slabs. A canvas from 1964 manages to be both luscious and austere, its black half bulging into the white, each plane accented by a slender raised line the same color as the canvas beneath but glossier, as in Robert Irwin’s early, more dogmatic-seeming line paintings of 1962.

Feitelson’s lines curl and loop through space like fine melodies--clear, precise and lyrical. And finally come the utterly simple canvases of the ‘70s, in which the lines resonate with the grace of the human body, and abstraction bares its figurative soul.

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Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Aug. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

An Electrifying Force: Gagosian Gallery is experiencing an energy crisis these days, but not the kind that’s plaguing the rest of the state. The crisis here is not merely within the gallery walls, but upon them. It’s not the result of a shortage in supply but rather an excess--and, most relevant to those in the vicinity, it’s not a problem or inconvenience, but rather something of a perverse pleasure to behold.

Mark Licari’s drawings are a stream-of-consciousness spectacle generated by the artist’s musing over whether the source that powers his toaster is all that different from what fuels the birth of galaxies. Whatever distinctions might exist he strips away, and fashions fabulous hybridized creatures in sooty ink wash and agitated line. Organic and mechanical energy merge as one raw force, daunting in power and horrific in form.

The most irresistibly grotesque of the drawings surges across all 54 feet of the gallery’s longest wall. Dominating the piece is a long, caterpillar-like creature that curls across the paper, its puffy flesh pocked with warty bumps and open, seeping sores.

Tendrils sprout not just from the bottom of its body, presumably as feet, but from its back and sides. They reach incongruous lengths. One rises several feet and is banded by wristwatches.

Remarkably, dustpans, electrical outlets, power saws and desk lamps meld to this unfortunate body, which clenches a rat in its ugly jaw. More rats scamper over the rest of the drawing, one of them entwined in a lumpy, frayed electrical cord that looks like an intestine but ends in clamps pinching a toilet brush at one end and a piece of bread at another.

Licari, a young L.A. artist who earned his master’s in fine arts from USC last year, draws with a voraciousness that’s hard to dismiss, even as his imagery repels. His sense of humor, however dark, and his vivid, cartoonish style keep the work on the level of play rather than prescription or prognosis. Equal parts Rube Goldberg, Mad Max and Mad magazine, Licari’s drawings show us raw, crude energy gone amok--energy, that is, in a crisis of compelling proportions.

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Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Aug. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Radiant Earth: Yadid Rubin, an Israeli painter in his 60s, returns over and over again to the image of home. In his vibrant mid-career survey at Galerie Yoramgil, Rubin’s exuberance for life’s gifts of shelter, sun and fertile earth literally radiates from his work.

One canvas from 1996 sizzles yellow from edge to edge, the paint forming shallow ripples like a cultivated field. Two tractors, made diminutive by the vast expanse of yellow, putter across it in opposing directions. It’s a childlike vision--simplified, basic but infused by an adult’s gratitude for the fundamentals.

This tone of reverie and this kind of imagery dominate Rubin’s work from the ‘90s, which dominates the show. “His Home Is His Castle” (1993) pays homage to domestic comfort by isolating the single home, a mere silhouette in eggshell white, attached to a simply articulated garden. The home and its plot anchor the canvas in the lower right corner, havens in an undifferentiated field of aqua blue.

The sensual extravaganza of living and the preciousness of the domestic realm permeate the paintings from the ‘90s, which draw from Van Gogh in both textural brushwork and intense, saturated palette. The work here from the 1970s is quieter in every way. Smaller drawings and collages on paper, their monochromatic, gestural markings whisper obliquely.

Beside the exclamatory songs of the vivid paintings, these meditations in pencil gray nearly get drowned out, but their delicate voice is worth hearing. Like the paintings, the drawings are tender, only more private, interior reckonings.

Only one work here dates from the ‘80s, a spectacular painting that bridges the restraint of the earlier work with the exuberance of the later. “The Red Tree” (1975-87) presents a more concrete image than the calligraphic markings of the ‘70s, yet it is less literal than the recent landscapes, more nuanced and ambiguous. This, Rubin’s first solo show in the U.S. (and part of the Absolut L.A. International Biennial), is an introduction worth following up on.

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Galerie Yoramgil, 319 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 275-8130, through Aug. 12. Open daily.