Paintings in Midst of Generational Conflict

Worlds collide in Takashi Murakami’s first solo show on the West Coast.

Since the young artist divides his time between Tokyo and New York, it’s reasonable to assume that the conflicts embodied by his paintings and sculptures are between Eastern and Western cultures. But what’s remarkable about this exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery is that the collisions occur entirely within Japanese culture. A clash between generations takes compelling shape.

Three beautiful paintings from 1991 show that Murakami has mastered Japan’s official Nihon-ga style, in which powdery pigments are layered atop sheets of handmade paper affixed to wood panels. Sensual and meditative, these nuanced works contain so many shades of flickering, saturated color that they cannot be called monochrome, although inattentive viewers might do so.

Murakami’s more recent paintings are brash Pop comics that are no less beautiful than his earlier abstractions. Every square-inch of the show’s centerpiece, a 9-by-10-foot portrait of a cartoon mouse named “DOB,” has been so meticulously crafted that it seems to glow from within.

The three newest paintings are all crispness and precision. Across their taut surfaces, Picassoid biomorphs meet John Wesley’s palette to form cheerfully menacing pictures. On another wall, a clocklike light-box displays Murakami’s mouse flirting with a character who looks like the daughter of the Michelin Man and a blow-up doll.

Rather than attacking Disney’s more famous mouse directly (the preferred strategy of several American artists), Murakami has invented his own mouse to engage Mickey in a bit of friendly, if ruthless, competition. More sophisticated and ambitious, this approach is loaded with ambivalence. Like the juxtaposition of Murakami’s early and recent pieces, this double-edged quality makes for a fascinating oeuvre.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Inside Jobs: Handsomely installed at Patricia Faure Gallery, “Portraits of Interiors” makes visual sense yet defies conceptual coherence. Defining portraits and interiors very loosely, this 10-artist show brings together various styles of photography (and types of photographic prints) to form a whole that’s as weightless as a daydream.

Guest curator Helene de Franchis never attempts to sweep viewers off their feet, nor to dazzle us with brilliant argumentation. Instead, her carefully chosen exhibition draws you into a pleasantly intriguing world, where logic loses its grip and categories are fluid. Time doesn’t stand still as much as it drifts by at a casual, relaxing pace.

Aside from the sumptuous yellows and glistening pinks in Alessandra Tesi’s towering enlargements of bathtubs and fixtures, the show’s palette is predominantly black-and-white, with a wide range of hazy grays softening sharp contrasts. Sirio Tommasoli’s 12-part, multi-view Cibachrome likewise employs a disjunctive format, but its aggressiveness is overshadowed by the ancient cemetery it depicts.

Only the high contrasts come through in Judy Fiskin’s lovely little pictures of antique furniture, so you have to squint to see them. Similarly, Uta Barth’s disorienting images of the spaces between things call your imagination into action. In contrast, the theatrically lit architectural models in James Casebere’s and Thomas Demand’s large prints convey a faint trace of after-the-party melancholy.

Stretching the exhibition’s already elastic categories to their limits are straightforward still lifes by Franco Vimercati and Marco Mazzucconi, and off-balance ones by Sophie Ristelhueber. But Roland Fischer’s double-exposure of a soaring cathedral’s interior and exterior puts the show’s goals back into focus.

“Portraits of Interiors” never pretends to document reality’s details. It strives instead to let viewers escape such conventions, if only momentarily.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Personal Problems: Whenever an artist’s personal feelings are called on to carry a work’s emotional impact, viewers are left out of the picture. Poignant sentiments may be a source for art, but their simple expression is never art’s point.

Despite the good intentions that must have gone into the altered objects by three young artists from Brazil at Iturralde Gallery, all that viewers are left with are stale cliches and boring recaps of fads that have already passed.

Childhood trauma is referred to by Lia Menna Barreto’s burned wooden toys and small plastic dolls that have been melted and stuck on a swath of silk. Dreadful weddings and awful marriages are evoked by Beth Moyses’ white gowns that have been burned or riddled with pushpins and stretched over canvases. Likewise, generic narratives about suffering and death are relayed by Rosana Palazyan’s embroidered dresses and baby blankets.

None of the stories hinted at by these works is sufficiently specific or elaborated to capture and sustain a viewer’s interest.

If artists want to use psychotherapy as a model for art-making, they’d do well to adopt that discipline’s doctor-patient privilege and refrain from displaying unresolved personal traumas as finished works. Making these pieces may have been therapeutic, but viewing them leaves a lot to be desired.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through Aug. 15. Closed Sunday and Monday.