Larger than life in liquid pigment

Philippe Pasqua is a good painter and an even better showman. Canvases in the French artist’s first American show at Patrick Painter Gallery command the sort of reflexive attention evoked by spectacles: You can’t help but stare.

Their appeal isn’t as low and lurid as a car crash (though flesh and blood factor heavily), or as thrilling as fireworks. They hover somewhere between sideshow and opera -- sensational, manipulative and briefly compelling.

Pasqua paints portraits, heads and torsos on a huge scale brushed with theatrical abandon. His prime influences are painters (Francis Bacon, to be sure; likely also Chaim Soutine and Frans Hals), though he seems to exploit the photojournalist Robert Capa’s dictum: If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough. By magnifying the scale of his heads to 8 feet and even 10 feet high, Pasqua forces us in close. The faces fill our field of vision; they envelop us.

His subjects, according to the show’s catalog, are figures with a chromosomal disorder, but their deformities, if any, are slight enough not to announce themselves. Their ages are indeterminate, somewhere between child and young adult, though their faces occasionally reveal a trace of middle-aged weariness.

Identity doesn’t seem to be the point with Pasqua, however intentional his choice of subjects. (In other work, he has featured a pregnant woman and a pre-operative transsexual.) Instead, it’s all about flesh and blood, the canvas working as a skin, the liquid pigment stroking and dabbing and smearing it into being.

The same unidentified young man appears in a trio of giant pencil portraits and three of the paintings. The drawings are nicely rendered in brisk, energetic line, though floating each head near the center of a 7-foot-high sheet of paper seems a gratuitous conceit.

In two paintings of the young man, Pasqua defines his skin and features in a range of reds, highlighted by creamy pinks and mauves and accented with scabby brown. It’s the palette of raw meat -- juicy crimson depths, pale knotted gristle and all.

Pasqua implies a nakedness that he never fully delivers. He summons Bacon’s blunt regard of the body as meat, and he musters an inkling of the edgy candor of Bacon’s un-composed faces. Ultimately, though, Pasqua’s paintings are fairly conventional in approach, merely amplified.

Considering the ordinariness of his script, Pasqua is overacting, but the performance is impressive. In one image of “Laura,� the girl rests her chin on her fists, which touch at the knuckles. She may be pausing in that position, but the paint articulating her face and arms swarms with motion. The cool Prussian blue of her sleeves beautifully offsets the heat of her agitated skin, a bustle of fuchsia, lipstick, mocha, umber and brick.

In another portrait of Laura, her teeth read as discrete, thickly frosted stones. Paint on her cheek appears to have emptied out, leaving a sagging, puckering sac of skin. There’s a thick, gritty buildup of pigment around the eyes, as in all of the portraits. Energy is densest there, most crowded with potential emotion.

That Pasqua doesn’t pursue that potential better doesn’t make the paintings any less of a visual tour de force. It just makes them pass more quickly out of mind.

Patrick Painter, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Aug. 31. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.patrickpainter.com

Venturing further into his landscapes

One of the most under-recognized artists in Los Angeles, Michael Norton can be counted on to fill a small gallery at ACME every two or three years with astonishing paintings. His latest batch is a marvel. Modest in scale, the paintings are epic in intensity and sheer tactile beauty.

Four of the works date from this year and one from 2001. The older painting, a tondo 14 1/2 inches in diameter, is characteristic of Norton’s richly atmospheric fields built up of thin layers of egg tempera. Over the years, suggestions of landscape elements -- craggy mountains, river-hewn valleys -- have been pronounced at times, amorphous at others. In the 2001 painting, form feels suspended in misty veils of light and color.

In comparison, the new works verge on flamboyance. The paintings are still as subtle and delicate as whispered poems, but Norton has intensified his palette and more purposefully defined the landscape. In one square painting hung on the diagonal, like a diamond, a cleft forms between a dense, slate gray bank and another, lighter, with gracefully backlit peaks. Horizontal streaks in the middle read as water in motion or ripples of fog. The diaphanous clouds above blush a warm, pale pink, echoed below in veins of a darker iron-red.

A rectangular panel features a vague, distant vista in a jolting combination of rust and purple, the paint alternately filmy and blotted. In another, this one octagonal, Norton conjures sublime, infinite depths as well as a spontaneous, fluid surface, with diluted streaks of blue washing over butter yellow to produce the green foreground.

These are chamber pieces with orchestral richness, immediate in their sensuality and rooted in traditions encompassing Romanticism, Symbolism, Luminism. Quick, clever gestures hog the limelight these days, but paintings like Norton’s, steeped in visual wisdom, will endure.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Aug. 12. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.acmelosangeles.com

International art with youthful edge

Mark Moore’s summer group show, “Ultrasonic International,� features 10 young artists from Japan, Korea, Sweden, England and the U.S. It’s a spirited assembly.

Formal vigor compensates for much of the work feeling conceptually warmed over: Craig Fisher’s car stitched of upholstery fabric resembles a third-generation Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture; Emily Counts’ gouache paintings of female explorers bear the imprint of Marnie Weber and an overdetermined awareness of bad-girl irreverence and kitsch.

To some extent, industriousness makes up for ingenuity. Kimberley Hart’s flock of felt birds standing on little rugs, connected beak-to-beak by strands of cheap plastic name-bracelet beads, is a craft project gone overboard, but with a bit of sentimental charm. Ben Weiner paints well enough to make an image of pearls enmeshed in hair gel look garishly intriguing.

Kim Rugg’s works are the most austere in the show, but also the most provocative. In each of four collages, she meticulously rearranges the text and images of a newspaper’s front page. She places the letters of headlines and all articles in alphabetical order and chops the photographs into mosaic bits reconfigured as gradated planes.

One page dates from Sept. 12, 2001, another announces (according to the title) the invasion of Iraq. But in both, reports of chaos and violence have been transformed into fields of logic, order, control. These are poignant operations of repair, acts of deconstruction in the name of harmony, however superficial.

Pop culture, vernacular imagery and graphic immediacy braid together with adolescent desperation in Jonas Ohlsson’s mixed-media drawings and with sophisticated refinement and a share of humor in Kenichi Yokono’s carved woodblocks. Jun Ho Kwon’s two engaging assemblages merge private poetry with the collective memory invested in worn, found objects. Abstracted, self-consciously hip maritime paintings by Andrea Hornick and a quirky, gloppy canvas by Ali Smith round out the show.

Mark Moore, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Aug. 19. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.markmooregallery.com

More than they’re crackled up to be

Kaoru Mansour has developed a method for making collage paintings that mixes invention and formula. In turn, the works themselves oscillate between surprising and rote. They are never less than attractive, but collectively they suffer from a sameness that comes from overuse of a distinctive technique.

The base layer of Mansour’s work is a coat of acrylic that dries with a crackle pattern similar to some ceramic glazes and is related as well to the spidery craquelure of old paintings or their varnishes. The Japanese-born, L.A.-based artist then applies dozens of layers of clear acrylic, sandwiching between them landscape photographs she’s made and transferred to transparent film, or scans of flowering plants.

She embellishes both types of images with painted patterns: linear weaves, spore-like floaters or dangling, bulbous teardrops. The process endows the paintings with a waxy, translucent depth and the patina of age.

Both are evocative, but their consistency overrides their idiosyncrasy. The technique becomes a decorative conceit, a shortcut to more varied means of engaging both time and space.

Mansour’s best moments are the slightest, when her calligraphic line meanders from the representational image into pure ornamentation. Manuscript illumination and Indian miniature painting come to mind. In works as tightly conceived and neatly realized as these, such spatial deviations and whimsical flourishes tip the balance from dismissible to intriguing.

LMAN, 949 Chung King Road, (213) 628-3883, through Aug. 12. Closed Sun. through Tue. www.LMANgallery.com