Art review: Jordi Alcaraz at Jack Rutberg
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The mind snags on Jordi Alcaraz’s media-bending works at Jack Rutberg, dismissing some rather quickly as gimmicky one-liners but remaining happily ensnared by others. The Spanish artist, in his first U.S. show, presents books that double as paintings, drawings that behave as sculptures, all within frames and plexiglass that forego neutrality for confounding relationships with the work enclosed.
“Two Poems,” among the more evocative pieces in the show, consists of an open book, mounted and framed. The pages are blank but for a single black drip. Two other black puddles pool just in front of the book, in small flaps of the protective plexiglass that have been bent, punched or melted inward. The dark pigment overflows those little scoops to drip down the plexi surface. Violating the image plane has not been a radical act since at least the slashed paintings of Lucio Fontana, but Alcaraz compounds and complicates the degree of optical, spatial and conceptual play.
In “To Catch a Drawing Mid-Air,” pigment has abandoned the surface entirely. The ‘drawing,’ a tangle of rusted wire, meanders out of the frame and is mired in the warped, wavering panel of plexiglass that also has been lifted up and folded back. In “Time,” a striking but heavyhanded effort, Alcaraz places an antique wooden figure in a vitrine whose front wall appears to pull back, as if a curtain, gently eliminating the barrier separating past from present. Alcaraz’s most compelling work is less about a finished image, a mark, than the process of making and perceiving it, enacting it. Verb-driven (puncture, flay, bend), it is most engaging when least resolved, when Alcaraz seems to be inquiring into or interrogating a concept, rather than illustrating it literally.
-- Leah Ollman
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-5222, through Nov. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.jackrutbergfinearts.com
Images: Two Poems. Courtesy of Jack Rutberg Fine Arts.