La Cienega Area

There is no way to cohesively describe Saint Clair Cemin’s work. The rambling nature of this Brazilian-born artist’s sculptural output so stubbornly shies away from being locked into stylistic and thematic pigeonholes that the pieces seem to form their own aesthetic. A quick glance shows that each piece is working on its own line of communication.

There is the muscled figurative modeling of Giacometti in the bisected bronze female figure in “Homage to Sartre” and the curiously cool Henry Moore/Brancusi devotion to smooth figurative mass in pieces like “Amour.” Some works seem to want to take abstraction to the outer limits of recognition, while others are content to be representational.

Most of Cemin’s pieces have a surrealistic, organic fluidity that seems to delight in pushing the forms into several directions at once. Sometimes the associations are to the human body and psyche, as in the beguiling “Relation” where a spindly little compressed torso seems to hold itself in midair by balancing deftly against two free-standing steel walls while gripping a floating floor with suction cup feet. But most often the associations seem to follow a strange, non-linear kind of logic. “Zeno” seems to allude to intertwined worlds of communication and invention. For Cemin, it is a seminal realm of fluid investigation where ideas take shape and then spring off on their own at different levels of evolution. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to April 29.)