Reveries that float on walls

The first photograph you’re likely to focus on, after taking in the whole of Masao Yamamoto’s 91-print installation, is an image of an empty bench on a rise overlooking the sea. It reads as an introduction, an invitation and as the perfect metaphor for Yamamoto’s project: creating a place to experience stillness and contemplate beauty, eternity.

The show at Craig Krull Gallery quenches like a cool rain. Yamamoto worships at the altar of life, and his work generates a state of quiet reverence.

At a glance, the modest gallery looks as if it’s been overtaken by a Constructivist collage. Rectangles of various sizes dot the walls in a jaunty rhythm. Up close and perused, the work is an affirmation of the meaning to be found in every moment.

The installation’s title, “e,” is, according to the artist, an archaic Japanese character with myriad definitions. Some of them refer to meeting, blessing, painting and wisdom. Remarkably, those acts and qualities fuse in Yamamoto’s work.

The photographs -- some barely larger than a thumbprint, the biggest roughly 5 by 7 inches -- are unframed and mounted slightly off the wall, so they appear to float. Alone and in clusters, the pictures dot the walls, peaking in density at the corner farthest from the entrance. They form a loose trail, with ample opportunities to wander off. Some hover inches from the floor. Several are far overhead.

Most images frame a single subject with straightforward clarity: a hand fingering crystals; a salamander climbing a thumb; a shoreline from above, each pulse of the sea leaving a foamy stripe; a nude woman cupping one breast; a brilliant, chrysanthemum burst of fireworks; the muscular elegance of cranes in flight; a mosaic-like path of smooth stones. Each is a moment of grace, either innately lovely or made so through attention and isolation.

Yamamoto spikes the collection of simple, organic wonders with glimmers of humor and photographic good fortune. A reed, shot from below, appears to meet up with a lone cloud high above, suggesting the shape of a dandelion. The lens compresses space again in an image of a factory smokestack, seeming to puff the perfect white cloud behind it.

Yamamoto also stages sweet resonances among photographs: a tiny horizontal print of a ballerina on point echoes a facing image of the moon, a sphere of light hanging in darkness.

A few of the photographs are in subdued color or with tinted accents, but almost all are black and white, toned in platinum grays or warm eggshell and manila. Yamamoto has given them the patina of time.

Like well-handled relics, many also have irregular, torn edges and surface scrapes. The 19th century feel of the materials resurrects the sense of discovery that accompanied photography’s first decades, the awe invoked at fixing an image.

Now of course images can be fixed, faxed, faked in a nanosecond. The contemporary condition of image saturation has been adopted by painters (from James Rosenquist and David Salle on up) and photographers alike. Yamamoto stages image saturation of a profoundly different order -- delicate, devoid of irony or commercial gloss.

Pictures here invite singular recognition. They hang like a precious strand of beads, harmoniously aligned and imbued with wonder. They form visual haiku, distilled and evocative. They serve as individual breaths, each one expanding the soul.

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The epic and the banal mix uneasily

Delphine Courtillot paints in a styleless style, neither highly refined nor expressively reductive, somewhere between elegant and coarse. Her large gouaches at Roberts & Tilton are strangely ambiguous, and yet not strange enough to make them consistently compelling. Too many of them look like mediocre photographs translated (with no loss of mediocrity) into paint.

Born in Paris, Courtillot lives and works in Amsterdam. Her paintings are set in grand estates -- chateaux with elaborate, vaulted basements and expansive gardens. The young men and women occupying these ancestral properties do so with dramatic flair (in the nude, save for a floral garland) or casual familiarity (snuggling a dog, climbing a tree). The epic and the banal mix uneasily.

Courtillot employs a snapshot aesthetic, cutting off figures at abrupt angles, freezing their expressions at awkward moments and retaining the flash’s isolating glare and even its red-eye effect. In “The Lights,” the most intriguing of the paintings, two young women and a man marvel at the night sky’s drizzle of milky bubbles, an anomaly of nature or a reiteration of the way the camera flash catches rain or snow.

In paintings like this, Courtillot’s combination of the grand and the everyday comes to a nice simmer. Nowhere in this first American solo outing, however, does it reach a full boil.

Roberts & Tilton, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 549-0223, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fleeting glimpses of life and beauty

In his stirring new work at Iturralde Gallery, Colombian artist Oscar Munoz has conceived of a memorial that works just like memory. The physical reminder of the departed doesn’t stay fixed and absolute, as in conventional memorial statuary, but changes over time, like psychic residue, until finally disappearing altogether.

Area audiences have had several previous opportunities to experience Munoz’s stunning integration of materials and meaning. In earlier works, Munoz made portraits in a film of powdered pigment that cracked and condensed as the water they floated upon evaporated. He also silk-screened images of faces onto burnished metal plates, so that they became visible only briefly, through the condensation of the viewer’s breath.

“Project for a Memorial” consists of video and photographic documentation of a performative piece. Using as a guide photographs of men and women from the obituary pages of Colombian newspapers, Munoz quickly renders a likeness in water on a slab of stone or concrete. The image coheres rapidly but lasts only a minute or so, until time and evaporation begin to claim it.

Five mounted screens in the gallery show the process from start to finish, a span of just a few minutes. Grids of still photographs record the creation and dissolution of each face in nine frames.

The portraits die a natural death, succumbing to the forces of air and light. If the subjects themselves experienced a more violent end -- an implicit theme in Munoz’s work -- here they’re granted a more gentle disappearance. Presence yields to absence, clarity to distortion.

That’s not just the course that memory takes, but life itself. Munoz brilliantly captures that universal process in all its urgency, futility and poetry.

Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-4267, through Dec. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Re-creating the ordinary in detail

Kaz Oshiro’s work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery is amazing, as well-executed trompe l’oeil work tends to be, and also superficial, as trompe l’oeil work also tends to be -- technique overwhelming all other concerns. Oshiro smartly references Pop, Minimalism and the Dada ready-made, but at heart he’s an amusing trickster.

He uses the standard tools of painting -- stretched canvas and paint -- plus Bondo, an auto-body filler, to create spectacular likenesses of ordinary, mass-produced objects. He has made stereo speakers and trash cans, microwave ovens and car bumpers. In this show, the Japanese-born, L.A.-based artist presents a panoply of washing machines, dryers and wall cabinets, as well as a portion of a kitchen.

Oshiro is masterful at mimicking the textures of white enameled appliances and Formica countertops. Gooey, candy-colored soap-spills on the washing machines seal the persuasive deal, as do grimy fingerprint stains on the cabinets and stickers applied to their sides.

One of the stacked laundry units has a pitch-perfect trail of gray paw prints across the washer door.

The disproportion between Oshiro’s extraordinary technique and his generic subjects generates a nice frisson. So does the contradiction between the stark functionality of the subjects and Oshiro’s elaborate, esoteric, even fetishistic effort. The work is admittedly, proudly hollow, in the physical sense. The experience of it is enjoyable, and just a tad deeper.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Nov. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.rosamundfelsen.com