Stephan Fritsch exhibits a nervy, blithe quality

Stephan Fritsch lights up the George Lawson Gallery with a show of paintings that look offhand, but bespeak a confidence not easily acquired.

Fritsch's work lacks a quality common to most contemporary painting, made unnoticeable by its near-ubiquity: Despite the ingratiating details it contains, his art appears unconcerned with seduction.

This nervy indifference, no matter its source, makes the paintings pleasing in a surprising and novel way. They arrive relaxed almost to the point of bonelessness, implying no conviction except that their cultural context will shore them up.

Fritsch, who lives in Austria, anticipates viewers who have already seen in painting such a range of stylistic posture and strategic attitude that they will read whatever move he makes as meaningful.

Fritsch's blithe creative posture would irk me did it appear even faintly cynical. Instead, it strikes me as founded on a realistic, even mildly liberating, view of his historical position. The fresh pleasures he generates feel slight but also genuine because they involve no denial of their own modesty or of their dependence on the viewer's complicity.

I cannot recall a painting show in which the pictures seem more immediately to change complexion depending on their viewer's disposition.

Los Angeles painter Roger Herman, also at Lawson, stands in contrast to Fritsch in nearly every respect, from material and content to attitude toward his work's reception.

In each picture, Herman aggressively sets the tone of its anticipated encounter with a viewer.

"Untitled (Cake)" (2010) has an almost Matissean appeal compared with the various skulls, nudes, conquistadors and other small pictures by Herman that fill a wall, salon style.

Herman's work has always felt driven, but never more so than in juxtaposition to Fritsch's dreaminess.

In the contemporary context, Herman's paraphrases of the German Expressionism of E.L. Kirchner (1880-1938) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) wobble from irony to nostalgia for lost authenticity to plain orneriness, finally exhausting the viewer's curiosity. But Herman has always had an answer to flagging viewer interest: productivity. It may no longer be enough.

The full nelson at Triple Base: Plywood matters to San Franciscan Jay Nelson. It inspired much of his many-faceted show at Triple Base, as the temporary plywood floor he installed there reminds the visitor with every step.

Anyone familiar with the gallery will notice on arrival that Nelson has also blanketed the storefront windows with plywood, notching it together in several pieces to echo the removal of knots and subsequent plugging that gives the material a uniform surface. A temporary wall will also come as a surprise.

Chance-determined plywood grain patterns and their interruption by plugged knots inform everything in Nelson's show.

His paintings arise from combinations of techniques - crackling of layered, incompatible fluid media, sanding, transfers mimicking gestural marks - that yield outcomes ungoverned by his taste.

The drawings have bits of plywood grain as kernels and grow from there.

It all comes back to the floor: Nelson's various strategies finally evoke an artist who does not know where to stand - a reasonable dilemma in the 21st century art world - and so shifts the weight of his efforts this way and that, never really settling.

Appropriately, Nelson has also selected a small show in Triple Base's back room of work by contemporaries by which he steers.

Stephan Fritsch: Selected Paintings; Roger Herman: A Wall of Paintings: Through Feb. 5. George Lawson Gallery, 49 Geary St., SF. (415) 772-0977. www.georgelawsongallery.com.

With Edits: New Work by Jay Nelson: Paintings, drawings and installation. Through Feb. 6. Triple Base, 3041 24th St., SF. (415) 643-3943. www.basebasebase.com.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle