WHEREAS THE REST of the Northern Hemisphere sees June as the point where summer bright and true arrives, Angelenos typically spend these months under a blanket of gray clouds that stifle our photon-addled brains. Yet, this year, the incoming heat of El Niño caused the hazy lid of the Tupperware that sits on the basin to lift, and luminosity has filled every nook and cranny. The reprieve signaled to me that it was time to leave my cave and venture out to find parking at galleries—traveling east to west to see if the sense of malaise over the state of contemporary art galleries was showing its symptoms in the choices of shows on offer. Mercifully, I found that, while the big dogs were feeling a little tired, offering their most polite summer group shows or pleasant-as-peaches painters, three of the welterweight outfits were looking mighty fine as they turned their attention backwards to chart a path forward.

On Western Avenue, Château Shatto (not a gallery one typically associates with efforts to revive historical movements) was showing “Dynaton: Convocation of Radiant Beings.” Laura Whitcomb, a curator and writer who seems to specialize in all things extra-perceptual, curated the show alongside the Lucid Art Foundation, an organization that “supports artists who explore the concepts of art and consciousness.” Together they’ve mounted a museum-quality presentation of this short-lived mid-century movement of artists in and around the post-war diaspora of European Surrealists in the Bay Area. The work demands a thoughtful installation, with its “macramé modernism” of earth tones, serial linework, and swoopy geometries, and Whitcomb undoubtedly rose to the task. The show benefits from prodigious, well-written labels, classy vitrines full of period materials, and incredible works of total abstraction. It’s beautifully installed to boot, with peek-a-boo wall cutouts that perfectly frame smaller sculptures, and is elegantly spaced so as to leave room for larger works to breathe.

The large-scale Messenger from the Three Poles, 1949, by the movement’s Austrian progenitor Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959), embodies all of the elements that characterize the Dyn’s paintings. It’s a moody marigold composition of intersecting black crescents, the interstices of which are populated by not-quite-gridded expanses of stacked rectangles and cubes—a bit of Wifredo Lam, a bit of Lyonel Feininger, and a dash of the Transcendental Painting Group. Nearby, Lee Mullican’s (1919–1998) Agawam Eclipse, 1951, is a Jay DeFeo–like painting of inky black streaks expanding out from the center of a rectangular canvas mottled with variegated thin yellow marks altogether delivering what the inverse of sunshine might be like.

Further west, a show of drawings by Mel Odom at Sea View was delivering glamour right where it belongs. The gallery recently relocated from the Jorge Pardo-designed “domestic concept space” in Mount. Washington, from which it takes its name, to this most charming 1930s restored house in Hollywood. Odom is a long-time New York illustrator with credits that span the reputable (Time, the New York Times, Rolling Stone) and less reputable (Playboy, Blueboy), and his Art Deco fantasies seem right at home here. Perusing the selection of portraits spread across two bedroom-size galleries almost felt like encountering portraits of the family who once lived in the house. With crisp lines and soft shading, the drawings are sexy without sex, queer in every sense without being bawdy. There are deliciously hammy moments, such as in Devil and the Dice, 1984, where a red bust of a Rudolph Valentino type emerges from a black plane and sits alongside a set of dice and a disembodied hand, which rises to meet a bouquet of roses that populate the background.

Other times, the high-key camp left me giggling, such as in The Swimmer, 1985, where a bespectacled lady clutches her chest and tussles with her wavy blonde bob as a ghostly impression of a male figure glides across her décolletage—the desire is palpable. The selection here is less beefcake-y and thus more female-leaning than the rest of Odom’s oeuvre, but when men do appear, it showcases the artist’s talent as a gifted portraitist. In The Red Orchid, 2021, a silver-fox daddy with oversize icy-blue eyes holds the titular fuchsia flower, with his crisp white-on-white suit-and-tie combo echoing his white hair. The show could almost be described as site-specific, placed as it is in these galleries bathed in the light bouncing off the fading silver-screen glamour of the Hollywood Hills. It is most definitely a delight.

Further west still, in Beverly Grove, was a petite show of works on paper by Rick Bartow (1946–2016) at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery. Since seeing the work in a retrospective at the Portland Art Museum a few years ago, I’ve become a big fan of the artist’s fragmented visions of human and animal forms. Racked with a kind of psychic intensity, Bartow’s image of Indigeneity seems less concerned with the structural, favoring an approach that is more inward-focused, perhaps a product of trauma inflicted as a Vietnam veteran. Violent marks in paint and charcoal form grimacing or snarling faces, brooding looks, and exploded or fractured bodies, recalling the ’80s neo-expressionism of Georg Baselitz, early Marlene Dumas, or Rainer Fetting. In the pastel-and-graphite What the Snake Told the Magician, 2009, an incorporeal head comprised of subtle swaths of blushing colors holds the outline of a snake in its teeth as it stares out at the viewer, while below a white expanse is punctuated by repeated smudgy handprints. Hostage/Lover, 1990, depicts a disembodied torso split into quadrants by a painterly white cross, with the eyeless head cut across at the jaw. These images are dark, no doubt, but honest and not eager to please in the slightest. As I was leaving, an amiable Tim Hawkinson invited me to a potluck pie party being held at the gallery later that month: “Everybody is gonna bring a pie.” How sweet.