Awe mixes with fear and disgust

The hooded figure in the Abu Ghraib photographs has shown up in a variety of places besides the front page. It has become freeway graffiti, a T-shirt emblem, iconic shorthand for the abuse of power and an argument against occupation of Iraq.

A variant of the image turns up in the subtle, searing work of Roberto Gil de Montes at Jan Baum Gallery. The San Francisco-based artist has long painted figures in masks, hinting at the dual work done by those coverings -- veiling form, revealing essence. In his new paintings and drawings, hoods and masks appear frequently, again doing double duty. In one stark portrait of a woman wearing a ski mask, the functional simplicity of the knitted head covering (worn, the artist notes, by the homeless in his neighborhood) competes with a darker undercurrent: The masks have become part of the uniform of certain terrorists, the streamlined shape with eye and mouth holes becoming a stylized skull, a portent of the death they bring.

Gil de Montes engages only obliquely with the political agendas of terrorists and torturers. Mainly and most poignantly, his work tracks quiet, personal anguish. How, the paintings and drawings seem to press, can the innate beauty of existence encompass the cruelties of war and subjugation? How to reconcile the preciousness of life and its callous devaluation? What, if anything, can be considered inhuman?

The complexity of these questions surges through even the simplest of Gil de Montes’ drawings, some in concise ink line on fibrous unbleached paper, and his paintings, in watercolor and gouache on paper or oil on canvas. Two breathtaking paintings on paper exemplify the artist’s tender passion for the body as soul’s vessel. In “Plumas,” a nude young man with arms crossed over his chest stands amid a gentle flurry of white feathers. They drizzle down upon him like a blessing. “Dolores Park” conjures a similar moment of grace as a dark-haired, androgynous woman closes her eyes to the falling snow around her.

Then there’s “Human Pile,” a tiny canvas dense with despair, showing in minimal detail a masked and hooded man seated atop a heap of other figures against an acrid green ground. And “Guantanamo,” an eloquent drawing, Picasso-like, of a man striding forward with hands bound and head lowered. Death haunts beauty everywhere here, and cruelty poisons play. In “Cumpleanos,” a tasseled pinata with luscious roses at its core telegraphs joy and bleakness at once. Its conical star arms are inky black, and the lone celebrant is a gaunt specter of a man crying oversized tears.

Sexuality forks off here too, both toward lusty passion (lovers on the beach, screened by calla lilies) and ugly subjugation. “Human Pile” and several other drawings and paintings pick up fairly delicately on the Abu Ghraib theme, with men made sexually vulnerable as a form of torture.

Multiplicity is the normative mode in Gil de Montes’ world. Wonderment and awe jostle with fear and disgust. Life is sacred but etched with profanity.

Even innocent play is streaked with impulses toward humiliation. In a series of heads, stable shoulders support faces composed of a splintered mosaic of jagged planes of rust and slate and gold. Identity, both personal and as a species, is innately fractured, Gil de Montes suggests. His meditations on that wondrous, compromised state penetrate deeply.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through June 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Different views

of Great Salt Lake

David Maisel’s new photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery are at first a compelling mystery. After long contemplation, and even after solving the riddle of what they are and why they look that way, they still remain powerfully elusive.

Gorgeous large prints, they register initially as pure color and design: a fragment of a stained glass window, its translucent panels bordered in black; a detail from a watercolor painting, one hue bleeding into another. The images are, in fact, aerial shots of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a mineral-chemical soup at once glorious and mortifying.

Whether Maisel shoots straight down or at an extreme elevated angle, the landscape beneath flattens into pattern and texture, nearly always free of recognizable reference or indication of scale. We could be looking through a microscope or telescope.

Either way, the view dazzles in its formal intensity. These are luminous abstractions and yet also chronicles of a bizarre, troubled landscape, one expansive ecological mood ring shifting from fiery crimson to grimy mustard, glassy emerald to dusky violet. Candy bright and pollution sallow, the colors reek of fantasy and desperation. The images invoke psychic whiplash of a sort familiar from Edward Burtynsky’s seductive photographs of abused terrain, and the eerily beautiful “Ozone” paintings of Joe Goode.

Maisel’s work, like theirs, delivers us to utterly vexed places, and not just geographically. The mix of gratification and discomfort the images elicit is nothing less than an aesthetic brand of schadenfreude.

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-0765, through July 2. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Not much to sink your teeth into

Back in the 1970s, when restaurants first started serving up nouvelle cuisine, some diners loved the theatrical presentation. Others rolled their eyes at the preciousness of it all, the pretense and the tiny portions stranded on those big plates.

Viewers to Pascale Lafay’s show will likely have one -- or both -- of those same responses. The photographs have been printed and installed in inventive, striking ways, but ultimately there’s not enough there to feed the mind or soul.

Lafay lives in Paris and has had numerous exhibitions in Europe over the last decade, but until now, none in the U.S. The current show was organized by Tamara Devrient for chambersprojects and is held in the exhibition-performance space La Finestra. Excerpts from a series titled “Beat” occupy the main space.

Most of the images depict the artist, a lithe young woman in a simple white shift, running through corridors and walkways and through unarticulated darkness. In a few pictures, she appears nude, underwater, knees to her chest, arms outstretched.

The grainy color prints, mounted on standing plexiglass panels staggered throughout the room, seem to float in space. Wandered among in no particular order, they serve as the sole fixed points in an open-ended narrative of sensation. While the images emit a slight whiff of fear, it’s the coolly elegant installation that’s most memorable.

In another series (hung on the walls), Lafay presents views of statues in Paris and Rome shot with a Vaseline-smeared lens, then printed on aluminum panels. The glimmering surfaces and skewed images are attractive and technically intriguing but slight. Lafay, who previously transferred photographic images onto translucent plastic sheets, to interesting textural effect, is admirably adventurous with ingredients but serves up very little to chew on.

La Finestra, 240 W. 21st St., (213) 745-4785, through June 26. Open Saturdays and Sundays and by appointment.

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Observations

on everyday life

As editor of her high school yearbook, Esther Bubley (1921-98) did her job under the influence and inspiration of newly launched Life magazine and the work of Farm Security Administration photographers. She took out the standard, posed portraits and replaced them with more candid shots. Her action foretold a long and prolific career as a photojournalist whose work was grounded in the observation of everyday life.

Bubley started working professionally in 1942, as a darkroom assistant for Roy Stryker, of FSA fame, in the Office of War Information. After showing him an extended portrait she had made of the boarding house where her sisters lived, Stryker promoted her to field photographer. Two pictures from that series (from 1943) are included in a show at Stephen Cohen Gallery that serves as a good introduction to Bubley’s work. Her career progressed through exhibitions (including several at the Museum of Modern Art), work commissioned by sources as diverse as Standard Oil Co. and UNICEF, and especially the publication of photo essays in Life, Ladies’ Home Journal and many other magazines.

Bubley is a better photographer than this show illustrates, in part because her work is understated, steeped in quotidian detail and period texture. It was designed to be seen in essay form, and multiple prints from a series must be shown together for their weight to develop.

This happens only sporadically in the show, most gratifyingly with Bubley’s tender study of bus travel in the Midwest and South. Few of her individual images have concentrated, iconic power, but she was gifted in conveying the flavor of a place, a moment. The great picture magazines embraced that kind of slow and sensitive vision. Their mass media successors -- television, the Web -- turn such studies into precious relics.

Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (323) 937-5525, through July 2. Closed Sunday and Monday.