In These Ghostly Homes, Scenes of Anxiety

The houses in Kevin Appel’s six new paintings at Angles Gallery are the domestic equivalent of ghost ships: phantom apparitions whose mysterious beauty is shot through with enough menace to make your spine tingle. Combining equal measures of dreamy intangibility and raw anxiety, these wall-size pictures bring the perceptual refinement of classic Light and Space works into contact with the queasy realism of art inspired by film noir.

It’s a volatile combination. At once seductive and chilling, atmospheric and claustrophobic, Appel’s haunting paintings lure viewers into a world where every dream is caught in a nightmarish undertow.

All of his images depict solitary buildings, either a modest cabin made of plywood or a more elaborate dwelling made of concrete and beams. All are set in the woods. And all are empty.

Some resemble stylish summer homes. Others have more in common with the Unabomber’s cabin. Devoid of furniture, all appear to have been abandoned while still under construction, just after their frameworks were built, but before any plumbing, electricity or other finishing touches were added.

They embody an extreme and peculiar type of stillness. Unlike the quietness that’s conducive to relaxation, the silence that thunders through Appel’s paintings recalls those moments when things are too quiet, when you know in your bones (and at the base of your brain) that something bad is about to happen. Time seems to stand still.

Appel intensifies this anxiety by limiting his palette to white. Traditionally, white signifies purity. But it’s also a sign of surrender--of yielding to a superior force or suspending a battle to face one’s enemies peaceably, if momentarily.

At first the paintings appear to be too antiseptic to be emotionally engaging. But after a while, their subtle color distinctions get more vivid. Although it’s easy to lose count, it seems that they include about 40 different shades, from feathery grays to warm creamy tones. A rich range of variations recalls views through green-tinted sunglasses or icy blue plate-glass windows. One of the best things about Appel’s art is that it treats white as a color, a physical entity too complex and sensuous to be exhausted by the words we have for it.

Another is his masterful command of surface texture. Slathering on paint with spatulas and sculpting individual wood grain with a knife, Appel pays homage to plasterers and carpenters, working people whose knowledge (and love) of a job well done is an end in itself.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through June 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Finding Power in

Random Destruction

In eight large paintings and 23 small drawings at L.A. Louver Gallery, Guillermo Kuitca uses found imagery to meditate on various forms of loss. Ranging from the inconvenience of lost luggage to the sadness of lost innocence, and from the regrets of a lost weekend to the tragedy of lost loved ones, his diagrammatic pictures cover an impressive variety of subjects.

In a sense, the Buenos Aires artist’s second solo show in Los Angeles is an encyclopedia of melancholy. The core of his exhibition consists of four black-and-white acrylics on canvas that depict enlarged versions of palace floor plans and ceiling patterns illustrated in Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert’s 28-volume “Encyclopedie.” The two 18th century Frenchmen attempted to summarize all knowledge in their magnum opus, which was out of date by the time it was published.

Kuitca has faithfully reproduced illustrations from their ill-fated effort, which includes such architectural details as decorative marble floors, grand staircases and theatrically framed spaces for paintings. Before these images have dried, he has poured water over them, dissolving their crisp lines into blurry messes. The breakdown of the orderly precision and rational clarity is a metaphor for the transience of cultural achievements--and ordinary forgetfulness.

In his drawings, he treats diagrams of modern buildings similarly. Visiting various Web sites, Kuitca has printed out the seating charts of Staples Center, Dodger Stadium, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Hollywood Bowl. He has also splashed a turpentine-like solution on the color-coded charts, dissolving solid blocks of color and sharp lines into hallucinatory blurs and scattered fragments.

A few of these images are pretty. Their flowing forms suggest music drifting through a venue. Most, however, are beautiful--and violent. They evoke explosions--sudden, earsplitting eruptions that destroy entire sections while leaving others untouched. People in the cheap seats are no safer than those up front.

The randomness of the destruction is what gives Kuitca’s works their power. His pictures of places where crowds gather invite contemplation about the relationship between individuals and groups, happenstance and fate, anonymity and fame, responsibility and blamelessness.

But another type of randomness diminishes the impact of Kuitca’s best works. The range of subjects he depicts suggests that his art is less driven by content than by loose formal relationships and glib technical facility. His pictures of baggage-claim conveyor belts, empty stages and an Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving in a glass of water have the presence of exercises--arbitrary dabblings that lack the concentrated focus of his more poignant pieces.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through June 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Visual Equivalent

to Comfort Food

If James Gobel were a chef, his specialty would be comfort food--heaping helpings of hearty dishes that taste great, stick to your ribs and warm the cockles of your heart. But he’s an artist, so he serves up the visual version of these physical experiences.

Generous, accessible and unpretentious, his unconventional paintings and no-nonsense drawings at Hayworth Gallery turn life’s simple pleasures into lasting satisfactions. Gobel pieces together his pictures by gluing carefully cut sections of felt to variously sized panels. Outlining these bold shapes with strands of yarn, he adds more details by stitching color-coordinated threads into the fabric.

He never pastes one piece of felt atop another but makes a place for each, adjusting its contours so it snugly abuts its neighbors. All inhabit a single picture plane.

Depicting stylish yet budget-conscious interiors, each of his images includes at least one section of felt that has been painted. In “Paul on Beanbag,” for example, the hefty sitter reclines on a bright red beanbag in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto an expansive view of the sky. Gobel has used an airbrush to spray cottony clouds on the baby-blue felt. These illusionistic additions provide a lovely contrast to the sharply silhouetted leaves of a potted plant and to the weighty solidity of the nude man.

Despite the simplicity of Gobel’s materials, he gets them to convey nuance. Although Paul’s posture mimics that of a decadent hedonist, he appears to be self-conscious and a bit awkward. His fleshy body recalls that of Buddha, but his wholesome face expresses none of the inner serenity for which the Eastern god is known.

Charm rather than grandeur characterizes the world Gobel represents in his modestly luxurious images. It’s where regular guys live.

In other pieces, he paints abstractly, sometimes dripping acrylic paint in the manner of Jackson Pollock, brushing it on gesturally, a la Franz Kline, or adding marbleized details like a set decorator. Abstraction and figuration freely intermingle in all of Gobel’s painted collages, which also treat fine art and Saturday-afternoon crafts as if they belonged to one big happy family. As warm and fuzzy as they are formally refined, his works demonstrate that every once in a while, you can eat your cake and have it too.

Hayworth Gallery, 148. N. Hayworth Ave., (323) 933-5565, through June 14. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.

Julian Hoeber’s World:

the Horror, the Humor

A baseball bat, a manikin’s lifelike head and a mechanism that spurts fake blood are some of the props in Julian Hoeber’s solo debut at Blum & Poe Gallery. Also included are several series of color photos shot on the set of “Killing Friends,” a digital video that screened for one night last week at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.

Hoeber’s 30-minute video is far more gripping than these artsy souvenirs in the main gallery. Unfortunately, the only way to see it is on a small monitor in the back room. Although this setting accentuates the fugitive feel of the finely wrought work, there’s no compelling reason it doesn’t play continually out front.

At once deadpan and demented, troubling and arch, whip-smart and hilarious, “Killing Friends” is the result of an original vision. It tells the story of a serial killer whose antics are both gruesome and touching. Impossible twists and delicious details complicate a narrative riddled with logical impossibilities and emotional conundrums. Scenes filled with unspeakable cruelty segue gracefully into moments of unbelievable gentleness.

At one level, Hoeber’s video spoofs the type of big-budget earnestness found in such films as “The Killing Fields.” It follows precedents set by David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.”

At another level, Hoeber’s video treats trashy slasher films as if they were as respectable as early art videos. Since the 1970s, when this genre was born, most artists have acted as if it had nothing to do with the movies. But Hoeber plants one foot in each world. A member of a generation for whom sleazy entertainment and influential video masterpieces are two sides of the same coin, he’s someone to watch.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.