Sam Maloof’s Shiny Furniture Invites New Look at Our World

Rocking chairs and excitement go together like oil and water. In the popular imagination, such old-fashioned chairs have long been associated with lazy afternoons whiled away on comfortable porches. Excitement, on the contrary, comes in all shapes and sizes--except that of the rocking chair, which shares more with the soothing back-and-forth motion of a baby’s cradle than with the breakneck speed of a supersonic jet.

At Tobey C. Moss Gallery, a breathtakingly beautiful rocking chair by Sam Maloof transforms this classic, grandparently piece of furniture into a sexy home accessory that, if not quite futuristic, is far ahead of its time. Next to the chair’s long slender rockers, gracefully curved arms and form-fitting seat, the U.S. military’s stealth bomber looks clunky and cheap.

Carved from black walnut and Gabon ebony, Maloof’s extraordinary chair is all sleekness and perfection. One of its most moving features is the way the 83-year-old Rancho Cucamonga-based woodworker has combined flat planes and curved surfaces to form many of its components.

For example, a rear view of the headrest and ribbed back reveals plump, swollen contours. Reminiscent of a woman’s pregnant belly, these forms emphasize the weight, solidity and warmth of Maloof’s natural materials. From the front, these same components are as flat as a smoothly sanded tabletop and as precisely delineated as well-made yardsticks. Rather than feeling two-sided or divisive, the chair resolves these differences into a whole at once balanced and fluid.

A gorgeous four-legged music rack and an exquisite round table made of fiddleback maple likewise give crisp physical form to the complexity of the human body. By acknowledging the strength of healthy bones and the suppleness of vigorous flesh, all of Maloof’s pieces demonstrate that everyday utility and mind-boggling beauty are two sides of the same coin.

Three workmanlike drawings, in frames made of seamlessly joined wood, drive this point home (without, like all of his work, the use of a single nail). The artistry of these consummately crafted objects resides in how efficiently they get viewers to see the world differently. More important, Maloof’s furniture invites us to live in a new and improved world.

* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (323) 933-5523, through Oct. 30. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Pushing Paint: Lavi Daniel makes some of the most wonderfully unfashionable paintings around. To purists, his drifting fields of nearly tangible shadows and highlights are too full of illusionism’s tricks to be taken seriously. To viewers who like their art to be driven by social issues, his subtly tinted oils on panel lack enough recognizable elements to link them to political reality.

If this sort of in-betweenness has limited Daniel’s audience, it has also served as a fertile ground for his quasi-abstract paintings from the past three years. At Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery, his first solo show in Los Angeles in five years explores the charged moments when light looks as if it’s about to take on the solidity and weight of sculpture.

Nearly all of the 44-year-old artist’s enigmatic paintings feel as if they’re poised on the cusp of some discovery. Leaving viewers free to determine whether that discovery is momentous or mundane, Daniel’s pictures of indistinct geometric forms emerging from fields of soft yellows, blue grays and warm browns appear to be in constant flux.

Some have the presence of malleable membranes, against the surfaces of which strangely shaped prisms appear to push from behind. Others resemble stylized turbines, through the dimly lit openings of which thrust powerful forces. Still others look as if they’re made of light the painter has somehow managed to fold--as if it were a piece of paper and he were a specialist in the art of origami.

Up close, Daniel’s paintings look less like images than thick slabs of modeling compound that have been endlessly manipulated. Fingerprints, smears and smudges are clearly visible on what had initially appeared to be pristine, ethereal surfaces.

But rather than suggest damage, these marks reveal that the artist doesn’t bother with brushes. Preferring the immediacy of hands-on applications, Daniel pushes paint around as a sculptor models clay. Out of step with art trends, his remarkable finger paintings march to a rhythm all their own.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., SantaMonica, (310) 828-1133, through Oct. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Old Styles: At Tasende Gallery, a selection of eight paintings from the 1980s by Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) is uneven in the best sense of the word. The most engaging works are so vibrant and lively that they make the lesser ones look bland.

For sheer optical impact, “Golden Door,” “White Nebulae,” “Blue Path in Space” and “Illumination Square” can’t be beat. Bristling with restless energy, the meaty surfaces of the Abstract Expressionist’s acrylics on linen consist of several layers of thick paint that never get muddy; instead they appear to be as dynamic as the day they were made.

Like a traditional underpainting, the first layer has been applied with a brush as Pousette-Dart laid out the composition of his often concentrically patterned works. Next, he fleshed out this structure by pressing the mouths of paint tubes to his images, leaving thousands of circular dollops of bright synthetic color across the surfaces.

More often than not, he would let one color dry before repeating this type of application with another color. After six or seven passes, he built up a texture similar to the spiny coverings of exotic fruits or the sharp contours of coral reefs.

The best works include a third type of paint application. Over the thick tangle of candy-kiss-shaped dollops, Pousette-Dart squeezed lengthy streams of acrylic onto his abstract images. Forming an indecipherable alphabet, these squiggling linear elements give his gooey works the crisp impact of punchy graphic designs while maintaining a three-dimensional lusciousness of painterly excess.

When Pousette-Dart balances clashing colors against textures and shapes that never settle into a single plane, his vibrant paintings seem to marry the patient rigor of Pointillism to the whiplash energy of Expressionism. In his hands, two apparently long-gone styles are shown to have a lot of fight left in them.

* Tasende Gallery, 8808 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 276-8686, through Oct. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fabulous Creatures: Laurie Hogin paints convincing pictures of rainbow-hued roosters, snarling bunnies and antler-sporting horses covered with the striped and spotted fur of unidentifiable rodents. At Koplin Gallery, the Chicago-based artist’s L.A. solo debut consists of 16 lavishly framed oils-on-canvas, each of which demonstrates that facts are weirder than fiction.

Although a viewer would have to be extremely gullible to think of Hogin as a Realist, what gives her over-the-top imagery its power is the capacity to get skeptics to see the world as an alien landscape, a world filled with enough befuddling wonder to fill a lifetime or two. Oscar Wilde’s conviction that a good lie is worth its weight in gold takes compelling shape in Hogin’s outlandish menagerie of misfits.

Birds whose fluorescent plumage puts male peacocks to shame occupy center stage in her phantasmagoric paintings. Through Hogin’s technical bravura and conceptual kinkiness, these beastly creatures do not fly so much as levitate. Barely brushing the lush, mushroom-pocked grounds with their ruffled tail feathers, their barbed feet flop around in the air as their backs arch in ecstasy.

Out of the mouths of many pour torrents of glistening bubbles. While rabid dogs from the Dark Ages (not to mention the Renaissance) are called to mind, the tiny soap bubbles that accompanied Lawrence Welk’s orchestra also lie behind Hogin’s multilayered paintings. Dreadful disease and vacuous entertainment cross paths in sumptuous pictures of a world gone wrong.

Hogin’s gilded frames make this point metaphorically. Studded with fake eyeballs and the claws of hawks, these borders between the worlds inside and outside the paintings assert that if art doesn’t grab your eye it can’t do much with your mind. Attuned to the slippery border between reality and fantasy, her theatrical pictures of fabulous creatures resonate most deeply by giving shape to delightful nightmares.

* Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 657-9843, through Oct. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.