ART REVIEWS : From Layered Images to Formal Structures

Artist Rupert Garcia’s use of pastel on paper is arresting. It’s not simply the way he reins in the intense colors he favors or the energetic rubs and finger smudges that flare and scorch the paper’s white ground. It’s also the improbable way he layers image over image, reaching for more information with a cleanliness of line that is as graphic as it is incisive. That layering is intriguing in drawings like “Frida, (Kahlo),” where a woman’s breasts and hips reside simultaneously in a bright red and blue contour-line image. But the layering becomes hard to decipher when one portrait overlays another. The obfuscation is intentional, rendering the image as dense as one of Bruce Nauman’s neon drawings, and showing similar polarities between truth and fiction.

Garcia is going a number of directions with these pastel drawings. In his portraits he seems able to subvert history or recast heroes. Yet underlying and energizing the ideas is his admirable drawing skill. The power of line and dry pigment is felt on every page and underscores the intensity of what he is questioning. As his huge penetrating portraits, “Jean Michel Basquiat” and “Olga Tamayo and Rufino Tamayo,” demonstrate, the power of a drawing lies in its ability to capture the essential. Here it reveals the flammability of genius and the uncompromising strength of potent personalities.

In the next gallery Dean De Cocker explores formal structures steeped in the mystique of the Industrial Age. His three-dimensional, wall-mounted sculptures suggest utilitarian hoppers, truncated venting systems or aging pulleys or counterweights. Inseparable from their machine age origins, the forms have been taken to a refined, anonymous purity that becomes a celebration of the fundamental integrity of their underlying structure. Yet more than the forms, the work’s unspoken connection to the wall and the way the slanting ends seem to disappear into unseen vents or indicate hidden passages within the wall eventually hold the attention. Like the ubiquitous air vents in most scenes of the movie “Brazil,” the implications are of hidden access and dangerous, unspecified processes, just out of sight.

Saxon-Lee Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to July 28.

Photo Trio: Photographer Randy West’s subtle black-and-white portraits on linen that is pressed into rag paper have the sensitive, fuzzy edge of graphite pencil drawings. Carefully delineating skin and bone from a surrounding blackness, the photographs give the subjects a tender vulnerability that has a sensuous, fleshy quality.

Yet as portraits they are academic and seem less about the people than the photo process. It is not until the artist turns that process loose on three large landscape panels and an interior still life with attendant portrait that we sense the potency of this method of making photographic images. The large vertical panels immediately become fog-enshrouded views from three windows, tantalizing us with indistinct, fragmented trees and hills. The still life, a gray table in a gray room, has the soft, gauzy feeling of a Norman Lundin charcoal study. A faint, almost black portrait of a man’s face mounted to the left of the room imagery gives the whole a dreamy, suggestive potency that promises to be an engaging way of scripting narrative photography.

Also showing are black-and-white photographs by Miki Warner and John Dugan. Warner photographs sections of what looks like raw canvas that has been bundled, ripped or twisted. The results are large abstract photographs that suggest Barnett Newman’s stripe paintings crossed with expressionistic tapestries. The imagery is minimal, but the effect is hauntingly tactile.

Dugan’s photos are more playful. Tightly focusing on miniature, invented scenes that are blown up enormously, the artist evokes a Boyd Webb kind of chuckling weirdness. Too often the images get caught trying to make small seem real. Most interesting are scenes that exploit their artificial materials and phony scale like the dueling stripes and rug nubs in “Markers.”

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 4.

Natural Springboard: Having settled amicably into spacious new digs in Santa Monica, the Koplin Gallery now shows two artists who use nature as a springboard for their art. Peter Charles’ sculptures refine natural line and form into hardened, sharp-edged perfection. Most of the pieces refer to still-life studies of vases and a sprig of greenery or a sweeping floral stalk. Treating that mundane but traditional subject in a Constructivist manner, Charles simplifies the line, flattens the form and cuts it into spare, geometric parcels of refined line and delineated space. Included in this treatment is the elevating pedestal that frequently lifts the steel sculptures high in the air in weight-defying suspension.

All the able plays with line and solid form aside, there is something docile, even cloying, about many of the pieces. Only when Charles fractures the too easy flower/vessel format into more fully abstract form is there a spark of expansive energy to the pieces. “New World Artifact,” with its laurel wreath wrapped around fragmented sheets of curving dark metal mounted on a tall skeletal table, looms with monumental strength amid the surrounding posies.

Sandra Sallin’s oil and gold leaf paintings of robust flowers in the next room have an equally difficult time surmounting the kitsch of their format. Part Baroque icon, part Hallmark card, they walk a fine line between sentimentality and lofty ruminations on life and death. Sallin is a more-than-able painter with a tendency to excess. All that gold, all those extraneous geometric references to religious architecture, all those vibrant tulips and roses crowding forward are meant to invite meditation. Yet the opulence, even on the more restrained “Ancient Echo” and “Icarus,” is almost too overwhelming to contemplate.

Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, to July 28.