Sonia Vordermaier at de Soto Gallery
The giant sculpture shoots out from the wall, projecting a dozen feet into the room. It is dark gray and from a distance looks like a geological mass, maybe giant shards of slate, or a massive shark bursting through waves. It is frozen violence, suspended in midair, and seems at once irresistible and frightening. On the other side of the wall are three smaller shards — as if all of it were growing through the walls. The sculpture has the intriguing title Dämmerzunder — a combination of the German words "twilight" and "cinder."

While the piece looks heavy and hard, it is in fact a dense foam flown in from Europe and cut — in situ — with a sword wielded by the artist, Sonia Vordermaier, who is based in Germany. We've had action painting, perhaps we can call this "action sculpting." As you get closer, you notice the hatch marks, the traces of vigorous slashing and cutting. There's also photography in this show — medium-sized prints of slightly odd or unsettling scenes — a swirl of leaves in an autumnal park, light coming around a closed garage door, a jagged square hole in a ceiling. These have a certain David Lynchian eeriness, but next to the sculpture, they are simply overpowered. This is Vordermaier's first solo show in the U.S., and I look forward to more Stateside exposure for her — perhaps at a larger venue to display multiple sculptures.

Margo Victor at The Company
In Western films the shoot-out is the money-shot. Two characters, their legs astride, gaze at each other in high noon's heat. The camera lingers on their sweating bodies before they quickly draw pistols. A loud bang and the loser falls. In Rotten Riotous West, Margo Victor teases apart this well-worn scene, providing the viewer with breathing room to appreciate the beauty in the spectacle. Victor's evocative film carries the exhibition. It opens on a cowboy-hat-wearing woman played by Jenny Shimizu, in a cold and barren landscape. Gun in hand, she is immediately struck by an off-camera assailant's bullet and hits the ground. This happens again, and again, from multiple angles. A hand massaging a fresh wound follows, and blood incomprehensibly drips, as if defying gravity, towards the top of the frame. Aspects of this scenario are reshot from multiple points of view, eventually leading to Shimizu firing her own gun directly at the camera. Like gorgeous raw snippets for a later feature, the work is like unedited dailies from a lost Sergio Leone film. By slowing down the action and framing the suggestive details, Victor deftly articulates the typical shoot-out as a caring, almost romantic battle with unknown forces. In another room Victor presents a selection of paintings that, after careful looking in the right reflected light, reveal themselves as painted stills from her film, obliterated by swaths of metallic silver paint and curvilinear details. While these alluring works bring out one's inner magpie, they fail to illicit the same sustained meditative pleasure as their source material. One is left to wonder why Victor, an avowed painter, made such an arresting film, but such staid paintings.

SAN FRANCISCO

PAUL MADONNA at Electric Works Gallery
The Bay Area artist/cartoonist/writer Paul Madonna is well known for his "All Over Coffee" comic strip in the San Francisco Chronicle, featuring meticulously rendered ink-and-wash street scenes endowed with "voiceovers" of poignant or ironic text. "Album" is Madonna's new show of drawings and paintings, but it's also this veteran zine creator's new annual publication, beautifully printed, and it displays his sensibility as clearly as do the large original paintings (ink, watercolor, colored pencil, gouache, acrylic) of 1970s toys. A partial inventory of these vanishing treasures includes: a handheld Mattel baseball game with big klunky buttons; thumbkin rubber critters of various species; rubber-band-powered balsa airplanes; a floppy disk marked "totally old school (in Sharpie, of course); an art deco water pistol; a fanny pack. Madonna's verbal dexterity is evident here, too, with such koan-ish titles as "The people loved him/The critics hated him" and its converse, "They're not delusions of grandeur if you fail," "You have to know your mind before you speak it," "What will become of me if I give up all of my obsessions?" and "We never change — we just become more of who we really are." Nostalgia has never been better.

NEW YORK

Steve Gianakos at Fredericks & Freiser
While it certainly takes a lot to shock nowadays, you have to admire Steve Gianakos for trying. His naughty hand-painted pop art makes you feel a little guilty for enjoying them in mixed-company. Featuring pornographic scenes from a male perspective, the black-and-white acrylic on canvas paintings resemble panels from a Tijuana Bible enlarged and painted with care, but not with perfection, since brush strokes are often visible. The drawing varies from overtly cartoony to a finer line quality, with some of them a mix of the two creating a surrealistic flavor as can be seen in It Was the First Time for Them Both (2009), where the branch of a tree reaches out to fondle a woman in a corset.

In addition to the anonymous illustrations and coloring book-style figures, well-known cartoon characters have made appearances in Gianakos' work and this show is no exception. A salivating Sylvester the Cat salts the pudenda of a violin-playing maiden in one of the raunchiest works, Dining Without Music Was Unforgivable (2009). Not for the easily offended, a lengthy fork sticks out of a girl's bum in Sometimes Her Mother Would Send Her Frozen Meatballs (2009). The titles of the works, such as Performing at the Regional Sausage Festival (2009), add an extra layer of humor to the over-the-top X-rated imagery.