A Horse of a Different Color in Portrait Photography

John Lofaso’s horse pictures tweak the tried-and-true conventions of this popular genre to reveal the quiet weirdness lurking just beneath the surface of everyday reality.

Neither grandiose nor extravagant, the Santa Barbara-based artist’s photographs at Craig Krull Gallery are subtly unsettling, and sometimes even fiendishly disconcerting.

Initially, each of the seven vividly colored prints made over the last three years seems to be a pleasant picture of a horse the artist has gotten close to. At first the off-balance charm of these works appears to be the result of Lofaso’s inability to take a picture as harmoniously composed and dramatically staged as those found on calendars and posters.

Think of the cinematic billboards that depict the Marlboro Man’s equestrian companions--romping, galloping and relaxing by the campfire--and you’ll have an idea of exactly what Lofaso’s images are not.

Pretty quickly you realize that the young artist is not a hobbyist whose passion for horses surpasses his talents as a photographer. Nor is he a clever “artiste” who makes smug, tongue-in-cheek images that mock popular passions. With growing conviction, you begin to see his pictures as portraits.

That, in itself, is very strange. But it’s only the beginning.

Most of Lofaso’s portraits are shot in full or three-quarter profile. Some of the sitters stare straight at the camera, making for oddly collaborative close-ups. The more time you spend with these photos, the more certain you’ll be that they reveal the quirky personalities of their subjects (if horses have such a thing).

As far as the horses are concerned, the sentiment they most often express is mistrust, if not quite trepidation. Though defiant confrontation never breaks out, some duck their heads, preparing either to step back or to charge. Their stances and attitudes suggest that they’d be more content if the artist just left them alone.

None of Lofaso’s works focuses on horses that might win prizes at county fairs. These are not the supermodels of the horse world. Big, solid and simple, their human equivalent would be workers who have the patience to toil in obscurity.

Nor do any of these pictures attempt to capture the animals in picturesque settings. Most of the backgrounds include mesh fences, metal troughs, telephone poles, dirt fields and old tractor tires: hardly the stuff of romantic fantasies.

Plus, the colors of Lofaso’s prints are unsentimentally artificial. To get such supersaturated tones, he begins with ordinary Polaroids, shot in the field. In the studio, he re-photographs these snapshots, enlarges them to 30 by 30 inches and frames them simply. The unnatural glossiness of the Polaroids is preserved, giving the prints a synthetic edginess.

John Baldessari’s flat-footed images from the late 1960s come to mind (particularly “Wrong,” which gets photography’s compositional rules happily backward), as do Kim Dingle’s recent paintings of tough little critters. Once you’ve fallen under the spell of Lofaso’s eccentric pictures, what once seemed utterly ordinary, even boring, is cast in the shadow of the truly weird, if not the extraordinary.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Jan. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Gravity Suspended: Peter Shelton’s new installation at L.A. Louver Gallery pulls the rug out from under your feet with more delicacy and grace than usually accompanies such rudely disorienting experiences. Rather than bowling viewers over, this multi-part sculpture, titled “sixtyslippers,” gently seduces, upending your perceptions with enchanting ease.

In the main gallery, 60 slender iron cables extend from the ceiling to just above the floor, where they’re fastened to 60 crenelated iron discs whose diameters range from roughly 1 to 4 feet. A soft patina of rust covers these simple forms, making them look like big suction cups that have been stuck to the floor.

Being in California, you can’t help but think that you’re looking at some kind of newfangled earthquake reinforcement. This impression quickly vanishes when you notice that one element is swaying, ever so slightly.

Almost instantly, you realize that quite a few of the pieces slowly swing back and forth. Hanging like pendulums, a mere quarter-inch above the floor, they’re propelled by the air currents constantly flowing through the gallery. Your body, and those of other viewers, provide sufficient turbulence to make these objects (which weigh up to 500 pounds) appear to be cymbal-shaped spaceships hovering around your feet.

The effect of all 60 together is unsettling. The floor itself seems to be moving, as if you’re a bit tipsy or the entire gallery has been transferred to the deck of a cruising supertanker.

Only then do you begin to discern the optical conundrums engineered by Shelton’s installation. After your body begins to take in the knowledge that the Earth doesn’t provide a firm foothold, your eyes start to play tricks on you.

As you look across the gallery to see if the walls are also swaying, your field of vision is broken up by the thin cables. Each of these vertical lines appears to be the edge of an abstract plane, a clear window that disappears if you look directly at it but that seems substantial out of the corner of your eye. As a result, the entire space feels faceted, as if it has splintered into hundreds of separate sections.

Like the fluid movements of Shelton’s three-dimensional discs, this disorienting perception is neither aggressive nor upsetting. “sixtyslippers” might pull the rug out from under your feet, but you don’t fall down; instead, you momentarily float free of gravity’s pull.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Stranded Dreams: Margaret Nielsen paints with such a delicate touch that to look at her small jewel-like works is to see where each hair of her tiny brushes has passed ever so lightly over the sensuous surfaces, pulling just a wisp of paint with it.

Perfectly suited to render such fine textures as hair, feathers and flames, Nielsen’s virtuoso technique is highlighted in 16 tightly cropped close-ups of birds, burning matches and people’s heads, whose faces are rarely as captivating as their wildly tangled locks.

At Patricia Faure Gallery, the compact dramas that take shape in these oils on canvas always take place at night, beneath starless skies whose inky blackness swallows light like a voracious whirlpool. Set against such unfathomable vastness, the timid creatures in Nielsen’s pictures seem both vulnerable and threatened, in physical danger and at psychological risk.

When the artist’s subjects match the delicacy of her paint-handling, viewers are treated to images as undecipherably open-ended as they are condensed. Standouts include six birds nesting in a woman’s Medusa-like hair, a pair of flying wrens holding burning matches in their beaks, another pair entwined in a pearl necklace as they tumble through the air and a single red bird afloat in an ominous pool.

Other paintings lack a similarly dreamy, quivering energy. An image of a chickadee perched on a knife’s blade, a bird pecking at a human heart and another one squawking at a snake are heavy-handed in their references to pop psychology.

In contrast, Nielsen’s best works have the presence of stranded dreams, single scenes from lost stories that cannot be connected to what went before them or to what happens after. Suspended in the present, these paintings stick in your mind precisely because you can’t figure them out.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Jan. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.