The drawings outline Portland State Vikings are nicely portland state devises rendered in brisk, energetic line, though floating each head near the center of a 7-foot-high sheet of paper seems a gratuitous conceit. In two paintings of the young man, Pasqua defines his skin and features in a range of reds, highlighted by creamy pinks and mauves and accented with scabby brown. It's the palette of raw meat -- juicy crimson depths, pale knotted gristle and all. Pasqua implies a nakedness that he never fully delivers. He summons Bacon's blunt regard of the body as meat, and he musters an inkling of the edgy candor of Bacon's un-composed faces. Ultimately, though, Pasqua's paintings are fairly conventional in approach, merely amplified. Considering the ordinariness of his script, Pasqua is overacting, but the performance is impressive. In one image of "Laura," the girl rests her chin on her fists, which touch at the knuckles. She may be pausing in that position, but the paint articulating her face and arms swarms with motion. The cool Prussian blue of her sleeves beautifully offsets the heat of her agitated skin, a bustle of fuchsia, lipstick, mocha, umber and brick. In another portrait of Laura, her teeth read as discrete, thickly frosted stones.

Paint on her cheek appears to have emptied out, leaving a sagging, puckering sac of skin portland state vikings football . There's a thick, gritty buildup of pigment around the eyes, as in all of the portraits state . Energy is densest there, most crowded with potential emotion. That Pasqua doesn't pursue that potential better doesn't make the paintings any less of a visual tour de force state beavers football . It just makes them pass more quickly out of mind. Patrick Painter, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. , Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Aug 31 Closed Sun and Mon state beavers . patrickpainter Venturing further into his landscapesOne of the most under-recognized artists in Los Angeles, Michael Norton can be counted on to fill a small gallery at ACME every two or three years with astonishing paintings His latest batch is a marvel. Modest in scale, the paintings are epic in intensity and sheer tactile beauty. Four of the works date from this year and one from 2001. The older painting, a tondo 14 1/2 inches in diameter, is characteristic of Norton's richly atmospheric fields built up of thin layers of egg tempera.

Over the years, suggestions of landscape elements -- craggy mountains, river-hewn valleys -- have been pronounced at times, amorphous at others portland state vikings basketball . In the 2001 painting, form feels suspended in misty veils of light and color Portland State Vikings - goviks . In comparison, the new works verge on flamboyance state basketball . The paintings are still as subtle and delicate as whispered poems, but Norton has intensified his palette and more purposefully defined the landscape university of football . In one square painting hung on the diagonal, like a diamond, a cleft forms between a dense, slate gray bank and another, lighter, with gracefully backlit peaks portland state cheerleaders . Horizontal streaks in the middle read as water in motion or ripples of fog. The diaphanous clouds above blush a warm, pale pink, echoed below in veins of a darker iron-red . A rectangular panel features a vague, distant vista in a jolting combination of rust and purple, the paint alternately filmy and blotted. In another, this one octagonal, Norton conjures sublime, infinite depths as well as a spontaneous, fluid surface, with diluted streaks of blue washing over butter yellow to produce the green foreground. These are chamber pieces with orchestral richness, immediate in their sensuality and rooted in traditions encompassing Romanticism, Symbolism, Luminism.

Quick, clever gestures hog the limelight these days, but paintings like Norton's, steeped in visual wisdom, will endure. ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd. , (323) 857-5942, through Aug 12 Closed Sun and Mon portland state university vikings . acmelosangeles International art with youthful edgeMark Moore's summer group show, "Ultrasonic International," features 10 young artists from Japan, Korea, Sweden, England and the U. S portland state softball . It's a spirited assembly. Formal vigor compensates for much of the work feeling conceptually warmed over: Craig Fisher's car stitched of upholstery fabric resembles a third-generation Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture; Emily Counts' gouache paintings of female explorers bear the imprint of Marnie Weber and an overdetermined awareness of bad-girl irreverence and kitsch Portland State Vikings . To some extent, industriousness makes up for ingenuity ducks football . Kimberley Hart's flock of felt birds standing on little rugs, connected beak-to-beak by strands of cheap plastic name-bracelet beads, is a craft project gone overboard, but with a bit of sentimental charm portland state cheerleading. Ben Weiner paints well enough to make an image of pearls enmeshed in hair gel look garishly intriguing. Kim Rugg's works are the most austere in the show, but also the most provocative. In each of four collages, she meticulously rearranges the text and images of a newspaper's front page. She places the letters of headlines and all articles in alphabetical order and chops the photographs into mosaic bits reconfigured as gradated planes. One page dates from Sept.

12, 2001, another announces (according to the title) the invasion of Iraq . But in both, reports of chaos and violence have been transformed into fields of logic, order, control state football . These are poignant operations of repair, acts of deconstruction in the name of harmony, however superficial. Pop culture, vernacular imagery and graphic immediacy braid together with adolescent desperation in Jonas Ohlsson's mixed-media drawings and with sophisticated refinement and a share of humor in Kenichi Yokono's carved woodblocks duck football Portland State Vikings - goviks . Jun Ho Kwon's two engaging assemblages merge private poetry with the collective memory invested in worn, found objects . Portland State Vikings tickets Abstracted, self-consciously hip maritime paintings by Andrea Hornick and a quirky, gloppy canvas by Ali Smith round out the show. Mark Moore, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. , Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Aug 19 Closed Sun and Mon. markmooregallery More than they're crackled up to beKaoru Mansour has developed a method for making collage paintings that mixes invention and formula. In turn, the works themselves oscillate between surprising and rote.

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