Wilshire Center

Huge and hugely ambitious, “Profound Visions: Art in Los Angeles 1988” is intended as a survey of the city’s key contemporary artists, both the familiar and the relatively unknown. During the course of this month, work by nearly 50 local artists--some of whom are affiliated with other L.A. galleries--will be cycled in and out of Ace Gallery’s vast warren of exhibit spaces.

On a recent visit, 20 mini one-person shows heavy on painting (with some sculpture and photography) included numerous delights and revelations, even if profundity was in its usual short supply. The young and restless crowd gets top billing here, and the sheer concentration of deadpan cleverness really sets off sparks.

Likely the least-known artist here, Raymond Pettibon peppered walls with numerous literary-sounding tags and simple, sketchy images, some on portable supports, others freely jotted in corners and over doorways a la Borofsky.

One painting, a jokingly Wyeth-like composition of window, blowing curtain and large shade pull, reveals a flying saucer in the sky. “When you have so perfectly disciplined your sight that it cannot be influenced by prejudice, you need not toy with photography and its distortions,” reads the devilish handwritten note.

Still in his 20s, Tim Hawkinson is also little known here. He sets about reworking everyday objects into oddly beguiling sights. Rows of irregular, scratchy rectangles marked on an old tray become a “Simplified Model of the Galaxy.” A curved expanse of panel stippled with browns and grays like an early Philip Guston is a “Sphere Illusion.” Six hundred match heads ignited on a sheet of glass to create a brownish haze point to the “Hand of God.”

James Hayward makes energetic, not-quite-square paintings in one or two colors. Done in red, with fat brush trails going this way and that and throwing up bulwarks of paint like snowplowed streets, the effect is hot and bothered. In pink and pink-over-blue, with some big strokes just plunked down and others blurred or piled on top of each other, Hayward coaxes out a flickering simulacrum of nature.

Robert Zoell’s deliciously stylized “Spot” paintings use a vocabulary of massive dots and ovals to do a number on Pop Art. A pair of tilted white-and-black ovals lope over a screaming yellow-green ground zapped with a stingy grid of black and white dots. Other big and little spot combinations, sometimes named after Dr. Seuss rhymes, look like dominoes or cartoon faces, loose-leaf reinforcements or ditzy logos.

Charles Fine’s paintings are waxy-looking affairs built out of encaustic. Shapes emerge through vertically oriented white veils like Abstract Expressionist paintings seen through frosted glass. “Hoja Negro,” a bronze sculpture, is a polished furled leaf shape leaning against a corner. In “Under Strange Skies,” a coffin and splintered-wood flowers are assembled on a heavily scored and ridged screenlike hunk of wood, maybe a stand-in for a forest.

Pauline Stella Sanchez contributes a selection of “Raked” pieces (each one a blue hardware store rake balanced on a square canvas covered with dense swipes of darker blue paint) and a real pumping unit drilling sink holes in the floor in a futile “Search for Potential.”

Norman Zammitt’s expansive paintings treat layers of Los Angeles smog with coolly scrupulous attention. Under blue skies, atmospheric sunset color glides down the spectrum. Variations on window-blind-like horizontal patterning inflect “Theo Gray, L.A,” a triptych.

John Eden’s color-rich, line-frugal geometric paintings include an “Altarpiece” series piece in which three careful, rust-colored variants on cross shapes--the middle one springily elevated by a single floating horizontal line--reside in partitioned areas on a purple ground.

James Morris’ hazy brownish paintings appear to simulate the indecipherable look of the earliest photographic images. The titles refer to William Henry Fox Talbot, the early 19th-Century inventor of “photogenic drawing,” and Alfred Stieglitz, whose “Equivalents”--cloud images--of the 1930s are imagined as they would look a million years later.

Roger Herman’s new urban landscapes have simmered down from his echt -Neo-Ex style and sometimes even venture into calm pastel geometries. But the black vertebrae-like forms that run through the dark high-rise tiers in “Houses and Street Row III” retain a harsh vision.

The chameleonlike quality of David Amico’s work gets an airing in a group of six paintings that range from an untitled spare image of three hands holding batons on a yellow field to “Otra Vez La Mula Al Trigo,” a big canvas popping with stripes and vegetative forms fixed in vibrant yet calculatedly restrained relationships.

Gerald Giamportone paints various orderings of black and white vertical stripes on the round projecting faces of wooden fretworks attached to the wall. He calls these big spool-like pieces “columns.”

A trio of Constance Mallinson’s vivid, teasing paintings that look like incredibly detailed collages includes “Modern Woman,” a work made up of landscape views from across the United States, and “Babel,” a tour of international architecture, from Pizza Hut to the Arch de Triomphe, fitted together to make a polyglot structure.

Jo Ann Callis’ humorous and smartly stagy gelatin silver prints of such sights as a shapely white vase “posing” in a swath of drapery (“Pageant”) have introduced a cinema-conscious, tongue-in-cheek retro-vision to photography.

Sound sculptor Michael Brewster gets a special enclosed room for his piece. Upon entering, you press a red button marked “two min.” and listen to the pulse of a hollow, reverberating sound that is eventually joined by another similar sound barely misaligned with the first one. At the end, a slight pinging effect seems like the optical equivalent of an afterimage.

Mark Lere’s “Standing Vortex,” an 8-foot-high irregular stack of small steel discs borrowed from the Newport Harbor Art Museum, makes a convincing case for the sculptor’s feel for the combined power of accretion, gravity, apparent carelessness and linear form.

Robert Therrien’s gray metal three-bulge “Snowman,” black beaker shape and upright coffin form, remind the viewer of the potency of this sculptor’s purified imagery.

Roland Reiss, whose name seems eternally linked to environments of miniature objects, is doing very different sculptural stuff these days. “Merx” has the feel of a Leger image redone in three dimensions as Pop Art--a sober balancing act of over-life-size stand-ins for such humdrum objects as a wastebasket, a household cleaner-type spray dispenser and an engine part.

At 80, Hans Burkhardt is several generations removed from everyone in this group but his work retains a bitter authority.

“Last Judgment, Dark Shadows, the Burial of My Enemies,” a large painting from 1966 with a muttering black-and-gray ground littered with bits of fabric and waxy deposits, holds skulls in several sizes and stages of wholeness. More starkly powerful is a small piece with the notation “ich sterbe” (I die), the second word tightly boxed and virtually eradicated above a dripping red summary scrawl: “A t Z.” (Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., to July 31.)