Delight is in the details

Paintings are not especially high-tech. Made of colored dirt that’s ground into powder, dissolved in viscous liquids and smeared on flat surfaces with hair-tipped sticks, these crusty artifacts have roots that go all the way back to cavemen.

Thomas Whittaker Kidd savors painting’s inefficient particularities. At Acme Gallery, the 13 oils in his profoundly generous L.A. solo debut celebrate the hard-to-explain hours that go into an activity that can almost never be justified in terms of an hourly pay rate.

It looks as if time stands still for the Culver City-based artist as he gets lost in the gorgeously painted details of his oddly believable landscapes.

There’s so much going on in every patch of grass, soil and sky that it’s obvious Kidd was wholly absorbed by every brush stroke and, consequently, was unaware of time’s passage, not to mention the world around him.

For viewers, the opposite is true.

To stand before Kidd’s potent pictures of regular guys doing everyday things in recognizable settings is to travel backward and forward through time. His images, most of them large, are windows onto prehistory and the future, which looks post-apocalyptic. As a group, they make you feel at home in both ages, which aren’t all that different from the strange times in which we are living.

In one, a man wearing a welder’s mask uses a beast of burden to plow a field near downtown Los Angeles. In another, a middle-age man rides a homemade paddle-bike to a verdant island around which old tires float like soap bubbles through the sorbet-tinted sky. In a third, a man pulls a rowboat ashore from a hot-pink river beneath an overpass. In the background, ghostly cowboys ride among giant translucent orbs, and hubcaps hover like spaceships amid dust motes that reflect the setting sun’s light with the intensity of fireflies.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In other paintings, hippies, hobos and grunge rockers hang out in a goth version of the Garden of Eden. A nude man with long blond hair looks as if he has ingested enough hallucinogens to make the Frisbee he’s reaching for travel in super-slow-motion -- right along with its two-dozen doppelgangers. Bulldozers, burning houses and cows being airlifted by helicopters add to the weirdness. And an abundance of anachronism turns the normally orderly progression of history into a topsy-turvy free-for-all that, surprisingly, is neither chaotic nor filled with fear, dread or despair.

In all of Kidd’s paintings, intuition beats logic, eight days a week. A twisted sense of serenity is omnipresent. And what goes around comes around -- often with interest.

Kidd’s pictures are in league with the user-friendly Surrealism of Steve Galloway, Charles Karubian, Kelly McLane and David Schnell. But what sets Kidd’s art apart is the trust that is palpable in every picture.

Despite the crude, low-tech materials with which they’re made, there’s nothing naive about Kidd’s paintings, stylistically or intellectually. Fiercely sophisticated, they demonstrate that painting delivers primal experiences and that its footprints can be tracked all the way back to the primordial ooze.

Acme Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through July 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Freewheeling with the help of grids

Not so long ago, no artist in his right mind would make a painting based on a grid. The regularity, regimentation and rigor of such restrictively rational structures represented everything art wasn’t -- fluid, freewheeling and unpredictable. At Newspace Gallery, a wonderfully engaging three-artist exhibition shows how quickly times change.

Structurally, the works by Timothy Nolan, Gary Szymanski and Eric Zammitt are similar. Each begins with the format found on sheets of graph paper -- perfectly vertical and horizontal lines equidistant from one another and repeated ad infinitum.

And that’s the end of the similarities.

Nolan uses silver and white oil sticks to draw oddly contoured shapes on semitranslucent panels of cast plastic.

The complex structures he maps are not proper patterns, because no component is repeated. The idiosyncratic results look both fractured and composed. If snowflakes had DNA, Nolan’s works would be their visual equivalents.

Szymanski is the most sophisticated colorist. Using traditional materials, acrylic on canvas, and a conventional setup, neatly ruled lines and the little squares of space they outline, he transforms a seemingly tedious format into optically animated experiences of subtle but significant ambiguity. His palette of soft pastels and tasteful home-decor accents makes for grids that simultaneously stimulate and soothe.

Zammitt fashions space-age mosaics. Each of his 8-foot-long panels is made of thousands of tiny rectangles of brightly colored Plexiglas that have been diamond cut and cemented together with synthetic adhesives. Each hard-edged abstraction is so meticulously crafted that you have to look closely to see the individual rectangles. The translucency of the Plexiglas complicates matters, as does Zammitt’s use of dark and light tints, which creates the impression that his works’ slick surfaces open onto deep space. Impressionism meets Finish Fetish in these impressively painterly surrogates.

In the three artists’ works, the orderliness of grids gives way to playful indeterminacy. Precision and ambiguity accentuate one another’s effect.

Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

They’re fun and they’re smart

James Siena’s little paintings are game boards for the imagination. Each combines control and chaos -- or rules and randomness -- in just the right proportions to entertain viewers of all ages. These bright, glossy works are so much fun to look at that you don’t notice how smart they are until later, and only then if the mood suits you.

At Daniel Weinberg Gallery, a visually delicious selection of five page-size drawings and 14 slightly larger enamel paintings on panel provides a thumbnail sketch of Siena’s 1990-2004 output, which is considerable and consistent. The New York painter is no space-waster. If you give him an inch, or even a thumbnail, he’s likely to turn it into any number of worlds within worlds -- ample space to let your imagination unwind along the labyrinthine paths he lays out.

Siena’s abstract patterns are loopy doodles that have been subjected to rigorous discipline. Most play circles against squares or straight lines against wavy ones. Evidence of struggle is nowhere to be found. His slick surfaces resemble hand-painted signs that have replaced words and depictive imagery with simple shapes and solid colors.

The paintings are eccentric, but they’re also mild-mannered, lovely and supple. It’s as if Siena has managed to put square pegs in round holes, and vice versa, while making the impossible task look easy and natural. Spirals, webbed networks, figure-ground reversals and patiently executed mathematical progressions allow him to do so with understated gracefulness.

Some of his most captivating compositions resemble the offspring of Russian nesting dolls and computer codes. Handcrafted manufacture and mind-blowing repetition dovetail in all of his works, which have the intensity and focus of the art of the insane. But unlike such work, Siena’s keeps developing. It’s heartening to see that his four paintings from 2004 are more complex, sophisticated and expansive than any that preceded them. Plus, they’re even more fun.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through July 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Minimalism in two dimensions

A sweet little exhibition of rarely seen paintings by Tony Smith (1914-1980) takes viewers back to a time before Minimalism solidified its identity as a sculptural movement that treated painting as a second-rate art form. At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, six oils on canvas from 1957 to 1962 and a funky pastel drawing from 1955 show the quintessential Minimalist playing with pictorial space as adroitly as he did in his three-dimensional works, for which he is famous.

Smith’s midsize canvases consist of irregular shapes of solid color interlocked with one another. All but one include only two colors. Given the simple format, it’s remarkable how distinct each piece is.

In one, a single orange form appears to be inlaid in a midnight blue ground. In another, chunks of tan and yellow flip-flop, creating figure-ground ambiguity. In a third, blue and red shapes do not fit together snugly, allowing the primed canvas to peek through the gaps.

The two black-and-white paintings are the only ones in which Smith mixes colors, forming shadowy expanses of gray modulation. In the five-color painting and seven-color pastel, the outlines of many shapes drawn in pencil are visible.

Now that the contentious relationship between painting and Minimalism is on the mend, it’s easy to see Smith’s canvases as the missing link between such venerated old-timers as Clyfford Still and Emerson Woelffer and such young upstarts as Monique Prieto and Ingrid Calame. Adaptation is one way great art endures the test of time.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-9911, through Aug. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.