Photos scaled to the human

What a relief to find a young photographer like Michal Chelbin, schooled in an era of visual sensationalism (headlined by the likes of Andreas Gursky) but drawn instead to the more quietly humanistic tradition of August Sander, Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark.

Chelbin’s thoroughly absorbing show at Fahey/Klein Gallery, her first on the West Coast, contains two dozen portraits of circus performers in Russia, England and the artist’s native Israel. The pictures engage the medium of photography on its old, familiar terms -- they’re black and white and matted to the size of a large album page (20 inches square) -- and it’s more than enough.

Two images are printed larger, in color, but the more modest black-and-white prints affirm that size doesn’t matter that much after all -- that an image’s power stems from sources more subtle than exterior dimensions. Chelbin’s work doesn’t need screaming colors and the scale of a multiplex theater screen to seize our attention and hold it.

She photographs the performers in casual settings off-stage: at home, on the street, in a park. Some wear their sequined and ruffled costumes and stage makeup, and some wear everyday clothes.

In any case, Chelbin seems to meet her subjects on a middle ground defined by trust and mutual respect. The atmosphere falls somewhere between public and private. Smiles donned to sparkle in the limelight have been dropped. Expressions tend to be serious, level.

Though Chelbin adopts a static square format for her pictures, she packs them with friction. There’s the slight titillation of having personal access to performers who, typically, are experienced only remotely. Most immediate, though, are the visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, innocence and experience.

In one image, an older man, his wrinkled features in shadow, stands before a couch where his young granddaughter sits, her frilly white dress fanning out across her legs and her blond hair crowned in light. In another, a dwarf in sweatpants stands on the front porch of a modest wood house, his squat body neatly framed by the dark void of the doorway behind him. He appears to be looking down to the ground in front of the house, where a naked baby lies on its back, fingering the grass. Our eyes rebound from baby to father, from the smooth pure skin to the swarthy chest, from one set of mildly abnormal full lips and deep-set eyes to the other.

Many of Chelbin’s photographs feature adolescent girls on the cusp of sexual awareness. Their slim, boyish bodies tell one story; their glitzy, ultra-feminine costumes another; and their eyes, sometimes alluring, sometimes questioning, yet another. Sensuous and unself-conscious, a Russian girl in one picture spreads herself languorously across a couch, a figure lifted straight from the charged canvases of Balthus.

Chelbin’s compositions are terrifically taut. There’s nothing extraneous but plenty to study. Her sober yet tender attention to her subjects levels the playing field between odd and ordinary -- a humanistic act if ever there was one.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 934-2250, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Making use of group dynamics

The summer ritual of carting out the inventory for a group show needn’t be such a yawn after all. All you need is a stellar stable of artists and thoughtful presentation of their work, which is exactly what L.A. Louver’s summer sculpture show delivers.

Nearly all of the dozen artists included have had solo shows at the gallery in the last year or two, but setting a few works by each in the company of others changes the chemistry of all involved. In election-year terms, the artworks are no longer spouting stump speeches. Now they’re engaged in spirited debate.

In the downstairs gallery, extremes play off one another. The clean, pared abstractions of John McCracken and Joel Shapiro spar with the messy humanism and experience-rich textures of Michael McMillen, Alison Saar, Nancy Reddin Kienholz and Deborah Butterfield.

Upstairs are the hybrids, abbreviated forms with complicated personalities: Peter Shelton’s charming oddball bronzes, Edgard de Souza’s purist vessels clad in hairy pelts, Gwynn Murrill’s sleek hawks on craggy boulders and others by Mark di Suvero, Richard Deacon and Ken Price.

Among the standouts in a show with few weak spots are McMillen’s “Studio� and Saar’s “Undertow,� both works from this year.

“Studio� is a delicious morsel, a sculptural snapshot capturing place and time. A small old suitcase with worn herringbone exterior, its interior (accessible through a peephole) suggests the kind of dank, grimy apartment hallway through which such a case might be carried. Diorama, dollhouse, abandoned set -- the piece is McMillen at his concentrated best.

Saar’s work too is typical and transcendent. Her half-size female nude is a solid, voluptuous beauty with skin of hammered copper and hair of coarse wire that sweeps over her head from behind, falling in a thick wave to her feet. Saar, a new addition to the gallery stable, is in fine company here, and so are those she’s joined.

L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Vibrant colors mix with dopey grins

“Nervous Norvis,� the subject of one of Chuck Agro’s cartoonish new paintings at Earl McGrath Gallery, has an orange face, oval yellow eyes and a pizza wedge of a mouth. His shirt’s thin stripes of lipstick pink and cherry red mesh a little and clash a little with the background’s broader stripes of pink and green. Like most of Agro’s characters, Norvis looks sheepish, awkward. Others, even if described in their titles as happy or lucky, wear similar dopey grins and look out at us with unsure eyes.

Their oafish tentativeness is not enough of a subject to energize the Brooklyn-based artist’s work. Slick enamel surfaces and vibrant colors seem like efforts to jump-start the paintings, but the work doesn’t have enough aesthetic, emotional or conceptual fuel to keep them humming.

Whether painting small on paper or larger on panels, Agro places every character in the same shallow space defined by stripes of vivid hues and assigns each an action (watching the sky, voicing a strong opinion) or state of mind (anxious, happy, nonplused). Their lumpy heads and goofy expressions -- outlined, cartoon-style, in black -- make them neither endearing nor particularly interesting. The colors buzz, but otherwise, the work just drones.

Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 657-4257, through Aug. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Using clay to blur the lines of reality

Marilyn Levine is one of those artist/tricksters whose illusionistic technique is so refined that her work blurs the boundaries between real and represented. The most captivating work in her show at Frank Lloyd Gallery is of a style that she settled on as a graduate student at UC Berkeley from 1969 to 1971.

A photograph of her MFA exhibition (in a catalog available at the gallery) looks as though workers came to set up, then abandoned the task to go grab a beer. Jackets hang on hooks. Purses, carrying cases and work shoes rest on pedestals. Levine, drawn to the texture and feel of worn leather, sculpted these objects out of clay.

Two such jackets, one in dusty avocado and the other russet, hang in the Frank Lloyd show, which covers a span of more than 20 years. They do, indeed, have the persuasive weight and supple ripples of leather. They are scraped and cracked in just the way and in just the places that long-worn leather garments tend to be. Levine, in her sophisticated ruse, covers all the details.

The same hyperrealism, as well as narrative pull, work their wonders in Levine’s bags and purses. In their native material, these satchels and shoulder bags would be too ordinary to merit special interest. Rendered in clay, they become objects of fascination, meticulous and loving portraits of the everyday.

Levine, who lives and works in Oakland, has also been sculpting cups since the 1970s. The mugs too mimic leather, specifically leather boots and shoes. One spunky piece resembles a cowboy boot.

Most resemble sneakers, with striped or zigzag trim, a floppy tongue and actual laces. The cups are strange, hybrid things -- part Pop icon, part found object -- but they cling to a somewhat tedious formula. They remain nearly as anonymous as the mass-produced shoes they echo, while the bags and jackets have the aura of personal relics.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Aug. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.