Art Review: Firelei Baez at Richard Heller Gallery

The work of Dominican-born, New York-based painter Firelei Báez, on view in her L.A. debut at Richard Heller Gallery, is a captivating fusion of lightness and heft, agility and brawn. Her figures — nearly all of them female — are fleshy and substantial, with an animalistic quality, in several cases, that suggests a mythological undercurrent. Yet they’re entangled in wreathes of wispy ornament: curling hair, leaves, fur, birds, patterned drapery and decoration.

Most of the works are gouache on paper, with elements of graphite, ink and silk-screen, and the figures float as if weightless across the white space of each page, with the air of being in constant motion, whether barefoot or in heels (as many are).

Only two years out of graduate school, Báez has packed the work with erudite allusions — the press release cites such works as Dick Hebdige’s writing on British punk subcultures, Islamic miniature painting and black Creole fashion in 18th century New Orleans — geared to fleshing out tangled concepts of race and the formation of cultural identity.

Art review: Izhar Patkin at Shoshana Wayne

“The Dead are Here,” at Shoshana Wayne, presents work from a series by Izhar Patkin that has a beautiful, provocative back story, one with more staying power than the work itself. The centerpiece of the show is a roofless room (29 x 22 feet) whose interior walls are draped with painted tulle from their upper edge nearly to the floor 14 feet below. The theatricality of the space makes a strong first impression. One steps from the plain and practical exterior (like the backside of a stage set) into an evanescent realm, more vivid than life but elusive. The delicate, translucent fabric falls in soft pleats, the images painted upon them repeating but resisting firm definition: trees in radiant pink blossom; cemetery headstones receding in rows; a man, woman and a few dogs resting at the base of some statues. The effect is dreamlike, momentarily startling. Its magic gradually fades.

The installation is one of several veiled rooms that Patkin, Israeli-born and based in New York, has made in response to the writings of Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. They met in 1999, brought together by a commission from a publisher. Two years later, Ali died of brain cancer, having composed aloud his final poem, “The Veiled Suite.” Its allusions to vision, truth, love and illusion are rich, as are Patkin’s references (discussed in a catalog) to the mystical Jewish notion of a “cosmic curtain” drawn around human experience. But little of this depth infuses the work itself, a beautiful but fleeting spectacle.

-- Leah Ollman

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Feb. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.shoshanawayne.com

Image: Izhar Patkin, "The Dead are Here." From Shoshana Wayne Gallery and Izhar Patkin, photo by Gene Ogami.

Art review: Lita Albuquerque at Craig Krull

Lita Albuquerque has long trafficked in the elements, in the patterns of the cosmos and the promise of alchemy. Hints of both the earthly and the lofty emerge in her recent paintings and sculptures at Craig Krull. The show complements an ephemeral piece that Albuquerque staged during last month’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival. Albuquerque’s work feels most resonant when in dialogue with the profundity of the earth itself, and matching its scale — in the Mojave desert, among the pyramids of Egypt, in the icy expanse of Antarctica. The works here in the gallery feel slight and static in comparison.

A cast of her body enrobed in brilliant, blue powdered pigment balances on a small aluminum block atop a larger pedestal.The form has a stiffness and heaviness to it that defy its levitating pose. A trio of gold-leafed jumpsuits hangs freely in front of a wall painted that same intense cobalt blue, but the piece feels amateurish and inert, offering little beyond the chromatic juxtaposition’s optical buzz. The simplest and most affecting of the works are a group of “Wind Paintings” that Albuquerque made by letting the earth’s own breath scatter red pigment across wet blue canvas, shaping dense plumes and wispy films. Titled by date and precise time of their enactment, the paintings are physical records of transient performances, true (and beautiful) collaborations between natural forces and aesthetic intent.

-- Leah Ollman

Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.craigkrullgallery.com

Image: Lita Albuquerque, "Wind Painting 01.05.12 3:33:10pm PST." From the artist and Craig Krull. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Art review: Benjamin Britton at Ruth Bachofner Gallery

The paintings on view in “Prevailing Conditions,” Benjamin Britton’s second solo show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, are brassy, internally spring-loaded abstractions that have the feel of being much bigger than they are. Fragmented nearly to the point of pictorial dishevelment — pattern upon pattern, gesture upon gesture, with vague allusions to recognizable forms strewn in among heaps of indeterminate strokes and swirls — they manage to contain the energy of an impact: a fevered, climactic coming together that only just precedes a falling apart.            

It is a winning palette, more than anything, that keeps the paintings contained. Energetically varied and deliciously nuanced, bold without being gaudy or simplistic, Britton’s use of color has an intriguing edge, a confident, indissoluble character that carries the chaos with apparent ease. 

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-- Holly Myers

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., G2, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300 through Feb. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.ruthbachofnergallery.com

Image: Benjamin Britton, "A Treasured Ability to Set Fires and Feed Them," 2011. From Ruth Bachofner Gallery.

Art review: Julian Wasser at Craig Krull Gallery

As a photojournalist working in Los Angeles for Time and other magazines, Julian Wasser was responsible for numerous familiar images, especially from the 1960s, when the city began to take off in the American consciousness. Several are among 38 prints in his fine show at Craig Krull Gallery.

Among them are photographs of comic Lenny Bruce on stage, a cigarette held between fingers that seem poised like an upraised benediction from an unlikely savior; essayist Joan Didion dressed in a caftan and leaning -- as if a prosperous yet bored housewife -- against a Corvette Stingray whose long, tumescent shape fairly shouts "phallus;" and, perhaps most famous, artist Marcel Duchamp at his landmark 1963 retrospective in Pasadena, playing chess with the buxom, pointedly nude writer Eve Babitz in front of his iconic Dada construction of frustrated erotic encounter, "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."

Less familiar but nonetheless riveting are street scenes, including the wryly funny sight of patrons munching away at the wiener-shaped Tail O' the Pup hot dog stand, with Mount Sinai Hospital rising not-so-subtly behind them, and a vertiginous view up Doheny Drive that creates a jarring visual collision between high-rise homes and hillside suburbia.

Art review: Adrian Saxe at Frank Lloyd Gallery

The goofy exuberance and try-anything giddiness for which Adrian Saxe is best known are nowhere to be found in his exhibition at Frank Lloyd Gallery, which pairs four pieces Saxe made in 1968 with 10 works from 2011. The L.A. artist’s first solo show in seven years replaces the out-of-whack gracefulness, acrobatic optimism and I-can-do-anything glee of his works from the last few decades with a sense of mortality richly seasoned by a deep appreciation of the absurd twists and turns that define modern life.

Over-the-top virtuosity is still essential to Saxe’s gorgeously glazed and fantastically formed vessels, which have so little in common with utilitarian pots and vases that they might as well be from another planet — one inhabited by a civilization more noble and less narcissistic than ours.

Like his four sturdy works from 1968, Saxe’s new sculptures are blunt — not really rugged but far less frilly than the post-modern Baroque extravaganzas that had become his trademark. Often stubborn, sometimes ugly and always grounded in the vulnerability of the flesh, they insist that the time for fussing over details is long gone and that it may be too late to do much that matters.

The fatalism embraced by Saxe’s mutant mélanges is liberating. It strips illusions from life and gets down to the naked basics of existence. Humor comes through loud and clear as a love of funny business makes despair look shortsighted.

Like trophies for achievements rarely celebrated by a culture obsessed with instantaneous communication (if not gratification), Saxe’s lumpy sculptures in “GRIN: Genetic Robotic Information Nano (Technologies)” are a slow burn, their pleasures profound and well worth the wait.

-- David Pagel

Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, (310) 264-3866, through Jan. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.franklloyd.com

Image: Adrian Saxe, "Welcome Stranger," 2011. Credit: From Frank Lloyd Gallery

Art Review: Barbara Kasten at Gallery Luissoti

For all the attention surrounding the 60-plus museum exhibitions encompassed by the Pacific Standard Time initiative, many of the real treasures have been found among the countless galleries that have also taken up the mantle, providing opportunities, in many cases, for a more focused and intimate engagement with the artists of the PST generation, wherever they fall on the Getty’s radar.

“Barbara Kasten: Experimental Photography From the 1970s” at Gallery Luisotti is one such opportunity. Kasten, who lived in Los Angeles through the ’70s but later moved to Chicago, came to photography by way of painting and sculpture. Influenced by constructivism, minimalism and the then emergent Light and Space movement, she utilized the camera less as a tool for documentation than as an active element in the creation of her compositions, photographing the play of light through installations she constructed in her studio from sheets of glass, mirrors, metal and other materials.

Abstract and geometric but with a delicate sense of atmospherics, the work moves between qualities of photography, sculpture and painting, exploring the formal nuance of line, shape, light and tone. Contemporary work displayed alongside that of the 1970s reveals Kasten’s concern with these elements to be a lifelong project, offering a welcome view into a focused yet deeply inquisitive practice.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through July 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.galleryluisotti.com

--Holly Myers

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through July 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.galleryluisotti.com

Above: Barbara Kasten, Amalgam Series, Untitled 79-13. Credit: Gallery Luisotti

Art Review: Charles Arnoldi at Rosamund Felsen

The creative restlessness aroused by the painting debates of the 1970s is on full display in a fine selection of Charles Arnoldi’s early work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Though he would never forsake the form altogether — and is indeed known primarily as a painter today — one can see Arnoldi feeling out the boundaries here in ways that would inform his approach in subsequent years.

Most of the 25 works on view assume the basic form of a painting: that is, a square or rectangular wall-mounted object, comparable in scale and presence to a window. Pictorially, they explore the basic elements of abstraction: gesture, line, symmetry, pattern, the interplay of flatness and depth.

Most of these works, however, are composed not in paint but with sticks, gathered from nature and sanded smooth. Some lie flat against the wall in linear patterns, others reach out a foot or more in gracefully complex relief-like entanglements. A handful depart from the wall altogether: free-standing forms that, in their slender linearity, nonetheless evoke the character of flatness.

The stick works, which fill the first two galleries, are paired in the third with a selection of actual paintings — oil and acrylic on canvas — whose stiff, crowded, overlapping brush strokes resemble nothing so much as piles of sticks.

It is impossible not to see this playful flirting between two and three dimensions as precedent to the graceful solidity of Arnoldi’s recent work, the best of which has a substance, a bulk, that seems to expand beyond the edges of the canvas.

--Holly Myers

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. B4, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through December 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.rosamundfelsen.com

Above: Untitled work by Charles Arnoldi. Credit: Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

 

Art reviews: James Richards and Frances Trombly at Shoshana Wayne

Over the last 20 years, Los Angeles artist James Richards has turned scribbles into a legible conversation about the abstract depth available from painterly surfaces. Unlike the elegant cursive of, say, the late Cy Twombly, his seems less concerned with epic musings and more interested in getting down into art's fundamental weeds. 

Nine new paintings at Shoshana Wayne Gallery continue to unravel the usually solid surface of a canvas. Richards tacks a continuous length of string to a painting's stretcher bars. It zigs and zags across the rectangle, like an aerial view of a road map -- or perhaps a medical book's diagram of ganglia, nerve endings or other bodily tissue, all hugely magnified. Oscillating telescopic and microscopic views fuse with a painting's ordinary material surface.

Here and there the string is interwoven with colored yarns or strips of fuzzy chenille, adding variegated textures. They merge with lines thickly painted atop the string, lines sometimes spreading wide to create abstract shapes. Because the open weave leaves considerable space, the string, yarn and paint cast shadows on the wall behind the painting, complicating the spatial logic.

Art review: Kelly Barrie at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Kelly Barrie’s Project Room show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art consists of a single stunning picture called “Mirror House.” Its genesis is complicated and fascinating, beginning with a haunting newspaper photograph taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Barrie "walked the image out of his mind" by articulating its subjects in photo-luminescent pigment on black paper, using his feet. He then photographed the drawing more than 70 times — by its own light, stored in the pigment — and digitally montaged those images together to create one seamless, deeply evocative print.

Remarkably, the how of the image’s making doesn’t overwhelm the what. “Mirror House” is a gorgeous hybrid, reading at once as drawing, blueprint and photographic trace. The muscular trunk and branches of a tree dominate the foreground, screening the view of a house in skeletal outline. Both stand in floodwater, which can’t be seen as much as deduced by the reflection’s doubling effect.

Values are reversed and the field is largely bluish-black, but the image looks less like a negative than a ghostly nightscape, the tree a dance of milk-white streaks and smears, the house a pale, bony memory. Powdery scatters abut fluid smudges. Dense opacity yields to filmy translucence. Barrie, London-born and living in L.A., builds a tremendous textural and emotional richness through his inventive process — part gestural performance, part documentation, an alliance of physical presence and temporal retreat.

-- Leah Ollman

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through Dec. 10. www.smmoa.org

Image: Kelly Barrie, "Mirror House." Credit: Santa Monica Museum of Art