Posturing in a Most Unusual Fashion

John Currin’s paintings of bearded, would-be Lotharios, sad-eyed Lolitas and over-the-hill glamour pusses often pretend to be solicitous of our desires--for sex, outrage or whatever. In fact, they are loath to do anything for anybody. Distinctly nasty things, they merrily transcend the outre to achieve new heights of banality, while complicating the whole thing by masquerading as “good paintings” with brushwork descended from Courbet.

Currin’s new paintings at Regen Projects are both the same and different. Though poised where conventionality slips off into the territory of the weird, these paintings of women are less conspicuously perverse than their predecessors--if, that is, you don’t count the fact that several of the half-undressed females have no breasts, or hands that seem to belong to men, or hairdos that alternate between halos of superannuated color and post-chemotherapy wisps.

Loosely inspired by Cosmopolitan magazine covers of the 1970s, these images isolate figure against ground--a pretty traditional thing to do in fashion photography, stock pornography and portraiture. But unlike Lisa Yuskavage’s freaky pinup paintings, to which they are often compared, Currin’s paintings do not merge the figure into the ground. Yuskavage takes a roundabout route to reveal her debt to Color-field painting, but Currin emphasizes the extent to which his figures are alienated, not only from reality, but also from the very genres they seem to want to mimic.

Currin knows his way around a brush, and the paint feels alternately like spun sugar, pancake makeup and mortar. There’s lots of posturing, especially in “Vassarette,” the latest piece on view: dramatic lighting, volumetric forms, etc. That you can’t stop looking at these images is no proof of Currin’s bravura technique. Rather, it indicates that exasperation is as good an excuse as any to fixate on a painting, and that exploitation comes in many forms--some so obvious they are almost invisible.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Basic Shapes: The simplicity of Otto and Vivika Heino’s ceramics at Frank Lloyd Gallery is deceptive. There’s little here to indicate more than 40 years of experience in fashioning, firing and glazing clay forms--no tricky adornments, virtuoso paint jobs or flamboyant curves. In fact, these large open bowls, narrow bottles and footed vessels, all produced during the past two years, are so plain they feel positively earnest.

Their sincerity is certainly a given. These objects revel in the horizontal lines that accrue as clay is dragged up while the wheel spins, in the distinctive, pebbled texture of the salt-glazed pot, and in the way colors shift across what seem to be uniform surfaces.

And yet there is nothing here to indicate that craft is an acceptable end in itself. This work possesses an inevitability that tempers the spontaneous mistakes of the hand-made object, transforming it into something we have little trouble calling art.

Where organic or gestural forms are painted onto the surface, they are often difficult to distinguish from chance effects engendered by the process. These works are appealing, but less so than those in which attention is focused on the basics: symmetrical contours and rich colors such as opulent reds achieved with copper pigment and cool celadons derived from Sung Dynasty ceramics.

The closest the Heinos come to playing coy is in one of the celadon pieces, a shallow plate decorated with what look like three bright red fingerprints. This “signature piece” makes a fetish of authorship and is the exception that proves the rule of these self-effacing works of art.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 939-2189, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.