Review: Keith Tyson at Blum and Poe

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Keith Tyson’s first solo show in Los Angeles, at Blum and Poe, is a tidy sampling of the Turner Prize-winning British artist’s recent output. It contains a handful of examples from each of three ongoing series: the “Nature Paintings” (large canvases covered in glossy swirls of poured pigment); the “Operator Paintings” (diagrammatic works combining collage-like layers of fragmented imagery and convoluted mathematical equations); and the “Studio Wall Drawings” (an assorted collection of pictorial ruminations and puns).

Tyson’s formal methods, when parsed out individually, are not terribly original. David Salle is a particularly visible and rather peculiar influence on the figurative works, as are a striking number of Californians, including Bruce Connor, John Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw. The “Nature Paintings,” though visually striking, play out a drama so basic to painting — fascination with the material and chemical processes of various pigments — that it can hardly even be called a trope, much less a revelatory insight.

From somewhere beneath this mimicry, however, a compelling quality of philosophic interrogation emerges. An uncomfortable sense of pictorial, thematic and linguistic confusion reflects a kind of existential unease.

In the “Operator Paintings,” Tyson seizes mathematics as an ostensibly reliable system of signification — a stable framework through which to view the universe. But he litters his equations with incongruous words and phrases (“chandeliers,” “roller skating,” “girls I have adored from a distance”), rendering them nonsensical and thus ultimately useless.

The absurdity of these juxtapositions evokes a poignant sense of failure, illuminating the potential futility of all knowledge construction, despite the basic human longing for meaning and coherence.

-- Holly Myers

Blum and Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 836-2062, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Above: ‘Pastimes,’ one of the ‘Operator Paintings.’