An image is an accident waiting to happen or a disaster already unfolding.

At least this seems to be the message of Vija Celmins as captured in the Menil’s Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66. The exhibition, co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Menil associate curator Michelle White and LACMA curator and department head Franklin Sirmans, will be on view through Feb. 20, 2011.

Celmins was born in Riga but her family fled the communist and Nazi invasions of Latvia to settle in Indianapolis. There she studied art at the John Herron Art Institute before moving to Los Angles in the early 1960s. Celmins came of age in what was dubbed the West Coast “Cool School.” Artists like Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ed Ruscha perfected a minimal, precise, and less exuberant style than East Coast artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

Celmins' earliest works feature quotidian objects depicted in painfully meticulous manner and in muted shades of gray, black, or brown with the occasional burst of color. You might find on these canvases a heater, an eraser, a desk lamp, or a steaming mug of coffee, each bristling with potential but receding from the viewer's touch.

The 1964-66 paintings featured in the exhibition emerge from a powerful focus on the everyday. But the energy of each work is capacity for harm. The earliest studies are of recently fired guns. In three of the paintings, an anonymous arm stretches out against a pale background as a puff of smoke wafts away from the firearm. T.V. (1964) shows a television depicting a smoking warplane breaking to pieces as it plummets through sky and cloud.

While her iconic television might suggest an interest in the representation of representation, Celmins' real interest lies in stored-up or just released force. It is as if the universe is a place in which all potential energy is violence waiting to be unleashed. Truck (1966) is not merely a shadowy portrait of a truck on a highway. Rather, the truck’s one significantly brighter headlight suggests that Celmins has captured the instant just before the vehicle veers toward the viewer. Tulip Car #1 (1966) might merely depict a man dozing in his car, but it seems more the portrait of someone slumping toward the steering wheel, unconscious or dead.

The possibility of harm becomes more distinct in paintings of war planes or in the image of a rhinoceros, but in general these works are extremely subtle. In fact, they might be a little too reticent.

The exceptions to this are paintings that highlight the captivating texture of disaster in each line and stroke of paint. Take Forest Fire (ca. 1965-6) in which flame billows up from a tangle of trees or Explosion at Sea (1966). In both, the canvases are busy with destruction, but that destruction seems to take place in incredible isolation. This is perhaps the real interest of Celmins — not the intimacy of violence but the solitude created by violence.

The inclusion of Time Magazine Cover (1965) provides a source of mayhem that seems to hover behind every brush stroke. The painting sharply renders in black and white the cover of an issue of Time that reported on the Los Angeles race riots. A billowing fire, an overturned car, and running figures emphasize that violence is real, rooted in contemporary events, and possessed of distinctive forms that billow up impersonally in the air over land or sea.

Her strongest works abandon the impersonality of violence by reaching for color and whimsy. Burning Man (1966) features a figure escaping the fiery wreck of a car but unable to escape the flames, which trail from his body and threaten to envelop him. Perhaps this canvas is so affecting because it is one of the few to deploy color. Indeed, the muted palette of these works can be wearying.

Or perhaps this is a problem of placement. The canvases are sandwiched in two rooms in the contemporary galleries and therefore lack the density and contrast that other exhibits at the Menil often achieve.

It’s hard not to be captivated by her sculptures House #1 and House #2 (1965). Each constructed dollhouse features the muted palette and disaster-prone imagery of the paintings. But whereas one house features a burning roof set atop a structure covered with Magritte-like clouds, the other features a revealed interior lined with fur. The element of oddity adds a tone that is a welcome relief from the meticulous and colorless burden of disaster in these works.

Vita Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-66 amply accomplishes the Menil’s goal of featuring the early works of established artists. A handsome, slim catalogue published by the Menil and distributed by Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition. And the Celmins exhibit has been paired with Kissed by Angels: A Selection of Work from Southern California, which provides context for Celmins with selections from Bell, Goode, Ruscha, John McCracken, and others.

The boldness of these works feels a touch cramped in the small, isolated exhibition room they occupy. It’s hard not to wish Kissed by Angels and Vija Celmins were closer together and visually juxtaposed in the serene white halls of the Menil.

But it’s hard not to love the luminous burst of color in Ruscha’s Kissed by Angels. This extraordinary explosion of color over dark hills manages to avoid the cliché of sunset; it is as if to be kissed by angels is to catch fire. The gorgeous class cubes of Larry Bell and even pristine aqua plank of John McCracken provide hue, texture, and lacquer.

Just what you might expect from the hardened kiss of Los Angeles cool.