Seven Abstract Painting Shows

Mark Rothko, #7599 Untitled (1280) (c. 1943)

Daniel Mendel-Black, #69 (2006)

Related Content

• Refik Anadol Does Fascinating Things With Art and Technology — Like His Plan to Project Video Onto Disney Hall
  April 18, 2013
• A park like no other
  February 14, 2013
• Fire in the neighborhood
  April 18, 2013
• Tuesday Is the New Thursday
  March 14, 2013
• Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week, Including Bikers Around a Bonfire
  February 13, 2013

More About

• Mark Rothko
• Pacific Design Center
• Daniel Mendel-Black
• Lavi Daniel
• Visual Arts

Probably the central dispute about abstract art in the 20th century hinged on the ostensible spiritual content or impact of the work. Some, like Barnett Newman, insisted that his paintings were “religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life.” Others were profoundly superficial materialists like Frank Stella, who famously opined, “What you see is what you see.” While I have never found Newman’s paintings very convincing arguments, the same cannot be said for the work of Mark Rothko, whose shimmering veils of color can — under the right conditions — produce something resembling an out-of-body experience.

Those conditions — specified by the artist, but seldom met outside his studio — centered on dim lighting, which drastically amplified the subtle optical effects of Rothko’s color fields. When MOCA has previously exhibited portions of its small but strong cluster of these works, it has been in group shows with other artists’ works that demanded the standard institutional brightness. By installing the bulk of their Rothko holdings in their already light-challenged Pacific Design Center satellite facility — and adding carefully muted lighting — the museum has hit upon a perfect symbiotic coupling that turns the PDC space’s shortcomings into a rare opportunity to experience Rothko’s paintings in their intended environment.

Including a couple of early small bio­morphic canvases and a half dozen of his larger, immersive works from the ’50s, “MOCA’s Mark Rothkos” functions as a mini-survey of the artist’s contributions to the New York School’s aesthetic legacy. But Rothko’s intentions weren’t aesthetic — or rather, they were aesthetic only insomuch as formal content served a psychological and spiritual function. While many of the spiritual claims made for abstract painting — or art in general for that matter — are far-fetched and unverifiable, this small but potent show finally gives Angelenos the chance to experientially test works like the spectacular Black on Dark Sienna on Purple in a setting conducive to their amazing psychic powers.

MOCA’s MarK Rothkos| MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., W. Hlywd. | (310) 289-5223 | Through January 21

Daniel Mendel-Black

I should probably be suspicious of my attraction to the Abstract Expressionist–esque paintings of Daniel Mendel-Black, scion of the sinister Art Center Mafia and avowed skeptic (in artist statements and in his awesome self-published zine Spring Journal) of both expressionist painting and romanticism. But anyone who name checks Larry Cohen (B-movie auteur of Q: The Winged Serpent and the It’s Alive trilogy) and John Carpenter’s L.A. docudrama They Live in his manifesto has got something on the ball. And the fact that Mendel-Black parted company with the prestigious Margo Leavin Gallery rather than keep producing his well-received neat-and-tidy grids of incremental decorator color variations suggests that however ironically refracted his painterliness may be, it is ultimately sincere.

His latest works, located in the Chinatown mall–embedded Mandarin Gallery, are pitched as sort of Zombie Mystery Paintings and accompanied by a typically literate screed titled (as is the exhibit itself) “The Paintings Are Alive,” positing 13 tongue-only-partly-in-cheek ripostes to David Salle’s self-important 1980’s polemic “The Paintings Are Dead.” But the paintings are almost too tasty to credit with any such contrived ironic distance — certainly they have more of an excuse to exist than most of Mr. Salle’s degraded pastiches of Rosenquist and Picabia.

While Mendel-Black’s color schemes range from grayscales to psychedelic fireworks-wrapper palettes, each of the new works demonstrate similar “back to front” gradations of color purity and saturation, as well as deliberate and ostentatious use of textural variations — background grids loosely rendered in flat multicolored smears with thickly impastoed solid-hued stripes hovering on ?the surface. It’s a winning formula, resulting in a panoply of subtle spatial effects and richly satisfying color and compositional arrangements that possess considerable staying power — they keep on surprising ?the longer you look. Many a true canvas is painted in jest.

Daniel Mendel-Black: The Paintings Are Alive| Mandarin Gallery, 970 N. Broadway, No. 213, Chinatown | (213) 687-4107 | Through January 6

Lavi Daniel

There’s absolutely no postmodern layers of self-reflexive irony to be overcome to appreciate the work of Lavi Daniel. A midcareer survey of the local, mostly self-taught painter’s painter at the Armory — guest curated by longtime fan Anne Ayres — traces his progression through several distinct, and distinctly earnest, phases over the past 24 years, ranging from the montagelike, verging-on-abstraction representational work of the mid-’80s to his recent bravura monumental oils on canvas depicting loopy, vaguely architectural structures that articulate complex illusionistic space without actually crossing the line into illusionism. En route he visits hazy, luminous geometries, hovering iridescent pastel voids and confident ink-wash grids. While each period yields up treasures — the trumpet-feet-curtain combo (all of the artist’s works are untitled) of 1988; the Chinese-takeout-containers-in-the-mist from 1997 — Daniel has clearly hit his stride in the last couple of years, synthesizing the type of linear spatial abstractions familiar to the work of Terry Winters and Brice Marden into something wholly original and uniquely Angeleno. An additional 27 examples of the virtuosic ink-wash drawings are also on view at Bobbie Greenfield’s.

Parables of Space: Lavi Daniel| Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena | (626) 792-5101 | Through February 25