Getting to Specifics in a Swirl of Imagery

David Reed uses a palette knife to create thick licks of iridescent color, some as coy as spiraling ribbons, others as blinding as waves of red-hot light.

Paintings, however, are only the half of it, which tells you more than a little about Reed’s take on postwar abstraction’s end-game theatrics. At Patricia Faure Gallery, a single, typically lush painting becomes the leitmotif for a melodrama, a comic opera, a cloak-and-dagger operation or a meditation (take your pick).

The painting hangs in the gallery’s first room, directly above a disembodied leather headboard. In the next room, three video monitors echo the so-far inexplicable setup, but at various removes: first, in real time, as monitored by a surveillance camera opposite; second, on tape, shot during a prior installation of this show in Las Vegas; and third, in a scene of the Vegas police show “Crime Story,� into which Reed has nearly seamlessly spliced the painting in question so that it appears as an unexpected bit of interior decoration in the TV show’s motel room-cum-undercover police headquarters.

Unbelievably, this is only the beginning. The gallery’s main room is covered, practically from floor to ceiling, with smaller paintings on board, color photocopies of those paintings and color photocopies of scenes taken from various films and TV shows also set in Las Vegas.

Affixed with pushpins or Velcro to the wall, these images dissolve into a swoony, seedy haze, so that the neon lights, slick streets, glittering casinos, cheesy sunsets and rippling stage curtains of Vegas play into (or play up) the paintings’ eroticized illusionism.

This is not to say, however, that Reed rescues painting by abandoning its specificity. Rather, he demonstrates that painting’s capriciousness, its protean nature, even its ingratiating charm is its true specificity--for better or worse.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through March 22. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Fierce: Georganne Deen’s new paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery would be spectacularly depressing if they didn’t keep self-pity at bay with such inspiring ferocity.

Yet it isn’t anger that fuels these charmingly grotesque reflections on the psychic trauma most of us blithely refer to as “growing up.� It is the resolve not to leave out a single detail.

From the ruffled suburban splendor of a pubescent bedroom, Deen conjures demons, memories, distractions, obsessions, longings, legacies, nightmares and embarrassments. A devil-girl hovers in a frame of white rickrack, with fingernails as malevolent as snakes. Floating above her in a white bubble, a teenager ties off a vein with the cord of her Princess phone as she prepares to shoot up.

Disembodied glamour-puss eyes display makeup colors for every season. The text reads, among other things, “I’m gutless and horny.�

Elsewhere, mom’s head is studded with drugs--prescription and over-the-counter--or she appears as a doe-eyed constellation of turbo-charged breasts. Pop takes the form of a pair of testicles wearing an actual knit cap, ornamented with a teeny-tiny lady on top.

In this context, “The way I felt about myself for not being whatever it was you wanted me to be,� inscribed onto one of the paintings, is a point of fact, not an accusation. Indeed, these tableaux, for all their drama, are totally non-hysterical. They are history paintings, evoking a time and place many of us would be loath to admit we remember.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through March 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Map Maker: In his new work at Marc Foxx Gallery, T. Kelly Mason maps various classificatory schemes onto one another, yielding the kind of non sequiturs that reveal systems to be absurdities from the get-go.

For example, Kelly takes a diagram from Claude Levi-Strauss’ “Cultural Anthropology,� which maps the kinship structure of a Bororo village, and annotates it with black-and-white photo transfers of Southern California “dream homes,� taken from real estate magazines distributed for free at supermarkets.

Or, he shows a chart from J.P. Guilford’s “The Nature of Human Intelligence,� which is similarly studded with pictures of Tudor-, ranch- or Spanish-style homes, labeled “Low Traffic Street.� And so on.

If this bait-and-switch gambit reeks a bit of Christopher Williams’ work, Mason extricates himself from some of the traps Williams falls into by muddying things up as he goes. His work deliberately eschews the antiseptic clarity Williams embraces, going in for smudged and irregular graphite lines, dirtied and crumpled bolts of paper and half-legible images. Even on the level of aesthetics, Mason is suspicious of authoritarian gestures.

Yet the show is a disappointment because Mason’s own juxtapositions yield so little, even in terms of irony. What exactly Mason has to say about Southern California real estate culture--for that matter, if he has anything to say about it, rather than it being totally incidental--is never made clear.

In the past Mason used architectural metaphors to comment upon larger social structures. Here, any larger purpose gets lost in the fine print.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 3026 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-2841, through March 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

L.A. Sprawl: At Tortue Gallery, Karla Klarin pictures Los Angeles as something hellish yet drab, a formula that is typical of the way this city seems to cultivate one extreme or the other.

In large panoramic views of the Wilshire corridor, the skyscrapers of Century City and a wildly crowded but unidentified intersection, tightly packed rooftops and bumper-to-bumper traffic jams are abstracted into grids that smother nearly every inch of the surface. This is no small feat, considering that Klarin’s surfaces are not flat. Built up out of wedges and mounds of Styrofoam, they project into the viewer’s space, as if to dramatize the relentlessness of L.A.’s famed sprawl.

The hellish part of this vision has something to do with the city’s voracious colonization of more and more space. It also has to do with the total sameness of the urban, suburban and ex-urban vistas that ensue.

Klarin plays up this uniformity by structuring her pictures as geometric, even mosaic-like configurations. At the same moment, she tempers it with sweeps, flourishes and rivulets of paint, which have the odd effect of making office buildings more histrionic than you’d ever suspect they could be.

The show is filled out with a series of smaller drawings. Some are studies for the larger works, and others are more intimate, depicting children glued to their television sets or drawing in their bedrooms.

At first, these seem like the flip side of Klarin’s impassive city blocks. But the cold, nearly military precision of the drawing makes it clear that these images, at least in spirit, are simply more of the same.

* Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 828-8878, through March 29. Closed Sunday and Monday.