ART / Cathy Curtis : Exhibition Proves That Simple Images Can Be Simply Simple-Minded

When do objects in a work of art convincingly symbolize a “deeper” meaning? How can we tell? Must we take the artist’s--or someone else’s--word for it? These questions bedevil an exhibition of paintings and pastel drawings by Sheila Lichacz at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Sunday.

Lichacz, 46, was born in Panama and lives in Newport Beach. Her constant subject is the simple clay pot, shown either individually or clustered together. The artist carefully grades the surface of each pot from light to dark to give the illusion of roundness. She dwells on the blackness of each pot’s opening.

But when you look carefully at the paintings, you realize how improbable a vision Lichacz offers. Unlike real pots, the edges of these vessels appear to be flattened out. When they are clustered together, it is impossible to conceive how their unseen sides could occupy such a limited amount of space. Along with their flat, undefined backgrounds, the pots seem to be part of an airless, unreal world.

Well, OK. That’s poetic license (assuming the spatial peculiarities don’t represent a deficiency of skill). But there’s more.

The titles of the works generally have religious references (“All Saints Day,” “And I Will Raise Him Up,” “Notre Dame,” “Ascension”). These titles are, of course, clues to the artist’s intent. But a long road stretches between intent and realization, and ultimately we are not obliged to interpret her works as she does.

Alas, there are untold problems in trying to make religious art in our wonderfully splintered society. We have few universally identifiable symbols (as opposed to the rich lode available to Christendom during the Renaissance) and inventing new ones is incredibly difficult to do with any success. The pitfalls are obvious: triteness, sentimentality, unintelligibility.

Lichacz’s work depends on the viewer reading spiritual meaning into images of pots. Because clay vessels inspire no such feelings in themselves, she is obliged to try to invest them with a mythical quality by manipulating color and form.

For gallery director Melinda Wortz, who wrote the wall labels, these images are practically seething with meaning--although more broadly humanistic than specifically religious in nature. Describing “All Saints Day,” she calls the pots’ dark openings “open mouths waiting to be filled.” “Notre Dame,” she writes, allows us to “intuit . . . both the vibrational essence of the universe and the vividness of actuality.”

In a sense, all this is not unlike a Rorschach test: You see an angry face; I see a bird; someone else just sees an ink blot. But Lichacz’s imagery seems far too banal to carry the heavy freight of interpretation that Wortz would impose on it (some of which is, in any case, little more than meaningless psychobabble--”the energy of being and becoming”--or dogmatic prescriptions for the universe: “an important metaphor for our time, which needs to embrace the needs of all living beings”).

Sorry, but I just don’t buy the cosmic significance of a painting that shows three big blue-white pots positioned in different ways--and is called “Trinity.” Or of a white shell spilling out a group of pots in graduated sizes, and called “The Birth of Life.”

We in the modern era have been brainwashed with the idea that less is more, that simple images can pack a big aesthetic wallop. But although some simple images are immense in their scope, others are just simple-minded.

“All Saints Day”--a view from above of numerous pots jostled together against a dark background--does suggest the notion of a community of individuals. But the distance between Lichacz’s painting and the similarly anthropomorphic approach of, say, sculptor Louise Bourgeois is very far indeed.

With her colonies of abstract forms, Bourgeois creates objects that evoke--by means of their meticulous size, scale and placement--the minute differences in the postures of a crowd of people. Lichacz settles for a decorative panorama of pots tilting this way and that.

It isn’t enough to paint an image that superficially stands in for some higher idea; the difference between banal and inspiring religious art depends on the extent to which the work reveals the deepest, most resonant aspect of the religious experience. Three objects may “represent” the Trinity in a bald way, but they utterly fail to create a personal approach to the myriad associations that revolve around God, Christ and the Holy Ghost.

By playing more adeptly with scale, Lichacz creates a somewhat more memorable image in “And I Will Raise Him Up,” in which a monumental grayish pot seems to float in a black void above a curious landscape paved with small, regularly sized rocks. There is a genuine air of mystery that might be seen to correspond in some way with the Resurrection.

Still, the artist appears far too complacent about a kind of art that is fiendishly difficult to do well, particularly in the context of late-20th-Century art. (In a self-serving statement, Lichacz writes unctuously that her paintings remind her “how fortunate I am to be able to say so much with so little.”)

Whether it is even possible to make evocative and convincing religious art within the deeply ironic context of serious contemporary art is an open question. It is likely that such art will have to incorporate qualities of struggle, dissent and doubt. It will certainly take a vision a good deal more searching and sophisticated than the one on view at the UCI gallery.

“Sheila Lichacz: Paintings and Drawings 1980-1988” continues through Sunday at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (in Fine Arts Village, off Bridge Road). Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. daily except Monday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.