New Paintings

When Laura Owens was looking for a studio that could double as an exhibition space for her first show in L.A. since 2003, she considered a variety of buildings. There was an out-of-business Glidden paint shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and a small defunct church on Melrose nearby. But those spaces seemed too specific or loaded architecturally. So it was something of a revelation when she first visited 356 South Mission Road, a 12,000-square-foot stand-alone industrial building in Boyle Heights that had originally housed a lithography studio in the '40s and later served as storage space for pianos - including Liberace's.

When Laura Owens was looking for a studio that could double as an exhibition space for her first show in L.A. since 2003, she considered a variety of buildings. There was an out-of-business Glidden paint shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and a small defunct church on Melrose nearby. But those spaces seemed too specific or loaded architecturally. So it was something of a revelation when she first visited 356 South Mission Road, a 12,000-square-foot stand-alone industrial building in Boyle Heights that had originally housed a lithography studio in the '40s and later served as storage space for pianos - including Liberace's.

Billy Collins, among the most accessible of contemporary poets and an eloquent advocate of poetry's place in public life, spoke recently about why people tend to resist the genre. Too much emphasis, he feels, is put on interpretation, to the detriment of poetry's "less teachable, more bodily pleasures. " Collins' words came to mind when hearing Enrique Martínez Celaya talk about his new paintings and sculpture at L.A. Louver and how efforts to decipher the meaning of a work of art too often hijacks the experience of it. In the case of visual art, and especially art like his that makes use of familiar, recognizable imagery, "we're so attached to what's given," he said, "rather than what's underneath what's given.

Billy Collins, among the most accessible of contemporary poets and an eloquent advocate of poetry's place in public life, spoke recently about why people tend to resist the genre. Too much emphasis, he feels, is put on interpretation, to the detriment of poetry's "less teachable, more bodily pleasures. " Collins' words came to mind when hearing Enrique Martínez Celaya talk about his new paintings and sculpture at L.A. Louver and how efforts to decipher the meaning of a work of art too often hijacks the experience of it. In the case of visual art, and especially art like his that makes use of familiar, recognizable imagery, "we're so attached to what's given," he said, "rather than what's underneath what's given.

Kevin Appel's new paintings are at war with themselves. While that may be hell for the artist, it's great for viewers: We get to watch as the talented painter goes back and forth between building taut compositions and blotting them out, leaving some shards scattered randomly and burying others under impenetrable layers of icy white paint. It's a give-and-take drama whose quiet fury is fueled by a kind of decisiveness that brooks little compromise and takes no prisoners. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, each of Appel's 11 new paintings begins as a pristine, porcelain-coated canvas onto which enlarged photographs get mechanically printed in ultraviolet inks.

* "Michael Lardizabal: Picturing a Lost Era"--A display of landscape photographs of the Northeast, including "Delaware Canal, Pennsylvania," above, opens Saturday at Jan Kesner Gallery. * "Matthew Brown: On Earth as It Is in Heaven"--New paintings that explore the spiritial in art go on view Saturday at Kohn Turner Gallery. The exhibition continues though July 2. "Culture y Cultura: How the U.S.-Mexican War Shaped the West--The historical exhibition continues through Sept.

At CB1 Gallery, all but one of Daniel Aksten's 10 new paintings in “Support, Edge, Variation” call to mind Minimalism. Their sharp edges, solid colors, geometric compositions and spray-painted surfaces appear to embrace the same rigorous regimentation of that keep-it-simple style from the 1960s. The oddball, “Phanorama (Line, radius),” suggests that Aksten is too promiscuous a painter to be a Minimalist. At 5-by-5 feet, it's the largest work in the show. It's also the most pictorial, with solid bands, overlapping shapes and spindly linear elements evoking a tabletop still life.

Reviews by David Pagel (D.P.). Compiled by Grace Krilanovich. Critics' Choices Nathaniel de Large: at large De Large is a light-handed junk-picker whose search for quirky stuff is only the beginning of an out-of-step quest to refashion the world into a playground for the imagination. The L.A. artist gets viewers to experience the world as a loopy adventure, a meandering journey filled with serendipitous twists and wonderful turns that keep us on our toes, almost dancing.

Reverie and Despair: At first, Emilio Cueto's stark new paintings at Newspace yield little but texture and tone. Half of them, painted on wood, are smooth and slick, an inky black in the corners dissolving to a smoky puff of gray in the center. The others, painted on canvas, are an all-over pristine ivory, with occasional sanded-down blips and bumps that hint at underlying, contrasting layers of paint.

Once inside a painting by Iva Gueorguieva, it's hard to leave. It's hard to want to leave. The surfaces, colors, shapes all clamor for attention, whisking the eye on a brisk, pinball course in disparate directions, then granting it moments of reprieve, small sanctuaries of brooding beauty. This is 21st century action painting, cousin to last century's version in its physicality, its conflation of internal and external realities and its scale. The largest -- and best -- works in Gueorguieva's show at Susanne Vielmetter exceed and envelop you. At more than 70 inches high and 100 inches wide, they literally position you within them by occupying your entire field of vision, the optical equivalent of surround sound.

The first piece I saw by Charles Christopher Hill was a tiny, thickly painted striped canvas that, despite being less than 6 inches square, had an inexplicable presence. I assumed it dated from the reign of Minimalism in the 1970s, but it was actually created in 2009. Hill's latest exhibition at Leslie Sacks Contemporary provides a spare but intriguing back story for this apparent anachronism. The earliest works in the show, from the late 1970s, are among the best: large, torn paper collages, shot through with stitching.

Kevin Appel's new paintings are at war with themselves. While that may be hell for the artist, it's great for viewers: We get to watch as the talented painter goes back and forth between building taut compositions and blotting them out, leaving some shards scattered randomly and burying others under impenetrable layers of icy white paint. It's a give-and-take drama whose quiet fury is fueled by a kind of decisiveness that brooks little compromise and takes no prisoners. At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, each of Appel's 11 new paintings begins as a pristine, porcelain-coated canvas onto which enlarged photographs get mechanically printed in ultraviolet inks.

Once inside a painting by Iva Gueorguieva, it's hard to leave. It's hard to want to leave. The surfaces, colors, shapes all clamor for attention, whisking the eye on a brisk, pinball course in disparate directions, then granting it moments of reprieve, small sanctuaries of brooding beauty. This is 21st century action painting, cousin to last century's version in its physicality, its conflation of internal and external realities and its scale. The largest -- and best -- works in Gueorguieva's show at Susanne Vielmetter exceed and envelop you. At more than 70 inches high and 100 inches wide, they literally position you within them by occupying your entire field of vision, the optical equivalent of surround sound.

At CB1 Gallery, all but one of Daniel Aksten's 10 new paintings in “Support, Edge, Variation” call to mind Minimalism. Their sharp edges, solid colors, geometric compositions and spray-painted surfaces appear to embrace the same rigorous regimentation of that keep-it-simple style from the 1960s. The oddball, “Phanorama (Line, radius),” suggests that Aksten is too promiscuous a painter to be a Minimalist. At 5-by-5 feet, it's the largest work in the show. It's also the most pictorial, with solid bands, overlapping shapes and spindly linear elements evoking a tabletop still life.

Ethan Allen His Life and Times Willard Sterne Randall W.W. Norton: 619 pp., $35 As any student of Vermont history can tell you - and the recent flood devastation in that state underscores all too well - water has played a huge role in shaping what would become the 14th state to join the Union. The Connecticut River forms Vermont's eastern border with New Hampshire, and Lake Champlain forms the majority of the state's western border with New York. But the boundary lines of current-day Vermont were hardly the result of riparian randomness: The future state was carved out of competing colonial claims asserted by New York and New Hampshire, and if there were a single individual who was as much a force of nature as the waters themselves at shaping the Green Mountain State, most historians would agree it was Ethan Allen.

Reviews by Christopher Knight (C.K.) and David Pagel (D.P.). Compiled by Grace Krilanovich. Critics' Choices Nathaniel de Large: at large De Large is a light-handed junk-picker whose search for quirky stuff is only the beginning of an out-of-step quest to refashion the world into a playground for the imagination. Wonder, spiked with a shot of gentle absurdity, is the Holy Grail he coaxes into existence with his DIY inventions. The L.A. artist gets viewers to experience the world as a loopy adventure, a meandering journey filled with serendipitous twists and wonderful turns that keep us on our toes, almost dancing (D.P.