Peter Frank

Llyn Foulkes, curmudgeon-genius of the L.A. art scene, has burst forth with a bevy of new work in two shows, displaying contrasting aspects of his Pop romantic persona. One aspect has Foulkes as a kind of obsessed outsider, cobbling together elaborate pictures of a world at once idealized and ravished......

The collages kinda look like a cross between John Baldessari and Llyn Foulkes, with a dash of early Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince (both of whom knew his work back when) thrown in for good measure; but John Stezaker’s small black-and-white silhouette superpositions and split-down-the-middle face-montages come from a different......

Cartography constitutes an art form in its own right — even nowadays, when mapmakers no longer depict monsters swimming at the edges of the known world. Artists don’t have to stretch their graphic sensibilities much to invest charts, routes and regions with universes of meaning — but in doing so,......

Abstract expressionism was, and is, not at all a matter of sloshing paint around in a fit of “self-expression.” The original action painters, and serious latter-day ab-ex acolytes, have nothing to do with such a mud-’n’-guts approach. James Brooks’ work is a particularly good example of the refinement, even elegance,......

MOCA just exhibited Robert Rauschenberg’s suite from the ’60s. Sandow Birk showed his new in-the-hood version last spring. And now, USC displays the etching-aquatint cycle produced by veteran East Coast painter Michael Mazur for an early-’90s portfolio. All these print sequences illustrate Dante’s Inferno, and each is glorious and frightening......

The “Venice Mafia” may be getting on, but its capi are staying mighty frisky, continuing to experiment with forms, images and materials even as they hone their recognizable styles. Drawings by three Ferus-era figures show they’re not frittering away their golden years. Larry Bell continues to experiment with his vacuum-pressed......

Mark Kostabi, Whittier’s second-favorite son, has been splitting his time lately between New York and Rome. The immersion in European classicism has done him good, giving an existential depth and even tenderness to his once-snarky critiques of contemporary life. Borrowing a beat from de Chirico — not to mention Renaissance......

Spokane-based Tom O’Day has it all figured out: If you can’t show or sell it, destroy and remake it. O’Day hates the term “recycle,” as he considers the reformulation of old art into new simply an efficient means of disposal — saving not objects from extinction but ideas from entropy......

Mucho buzz about abstract painting in California; here are three shows that generate their share of the excitement. Carlos Villa and the late Leo Valledor, both Filipino–Bay Areans — cousins, in fact, born the same year (1936) but with very different artistic temperaments — show together to great advantage. Villa’s......

Neil Wax exercises an uncanny ability to emulate the graphic sensibility of the supermarket shelf to subversive but touching ends. For instance, Wax labels various cleaning- and personal-care-product containers with “grief,” “guilt,” “pity” and other venal (and a few deadly) sins — lettered and annotated in perfect name-brand logoese. And......