ART REVIEWS : The Class Menagerie of Tom Knechtel

Fairies, gnomes, mythical beasts and other fanciful little creatures populate Tom Knechtel’s exquisitely rendered and fantasy-saturated paintings and drawings at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. With breathless virtuosity, an unabashed love for his subjects and a refined taste for life’s unsavory underside, Knechtel concocts dreamy scenarios teeming with an impressive abundance of luscious details.

In “Lessons In the Theatre: Ejaculations,” two plump putti , one with a peg-leg and the other with an arm that ends in a bandaged stump, fly off with a throbbing red heart. A charging, translucent unicorn, with the head and hide of a rhinoceros, hosts a miniature civilization of fishermen and boaters who go about their daily activities on the river that spills from the unicorn’s erect penis. Three frumpy gentlemen, who seem to have fallen out of a 19th-Century morality tale by Charles Dickens, wander around the painting, past swarthy wrestlers, a winged kangaroo and leering jack-o-lanterns, more bemused and curious than frightened or upset.

Knechtel’s drop-dead mastery of his medium allows him to transform scenarios that sound lurid, even disgusting, into whimsically playful pictures as delightful as they are irresistible. His one-of-a-kind art has the innocent simplicity of children’s picture books. Although it serves up an excess of explicit sexuality, and fully indulges the dark side of desire, it never seems perverse, outlandish or even remotely inspired by the need to shock.

His paintings disarm their viewers by luring us into a magical world, enticing us to marvel at the awesome richness of their delicate illusions. Knechtel is at his meticulous best when he renders tiny ribbons, banners and streamers, or semi-transparent, imaginary animals whose insides are filled with luminous organs and elaborate skeletal structures. Both banners and beasts reveal more than the naked eye can usually see. The sinuous lengths of fabric twist through space, writhe around in the air as if blown by invisible winds and double back upon themselves to show both of their colorfully worded sides.

Similarly, Knechtel’s crazy menagerie of mammals and insects consists of a plethora of diversely textured furs, beaks, hoofs, claws, horns, wings, feathers, armatures and membranes. The see-through skins suggest that the obsessed artist cannot rest until he has lavished his attention on both inside and out. These fantastic animals reveal a connoisseur’s fascination with the internal mechanics of life and the underlying rhythms of existence.

His bravura technical wizardry sustains the viewer’s gaze and piques one’s interest for much longer than we normally look at paintings. Knechtel rewards our attention with a healthy surplus of visual pleasure, often allowing us to believe that we’re seeing particular details for the very first time.

More importantly, his engaging pictures also serve a moral purpose. After awakening our fascination by demanding that we recognize and examine the artist’s virtuoso talents, his images deftly transfer this sense of wide-eyed wonder away from their feats of formal brilliance and toward the natural world around us.

In the end, Knechtel’s extremely detailed paintings do not represent a perverse indulgence in fin-de-siecle decadence, but give sensuous shape to a well-rounded exploration of life’s full cycle. From birth through maturity to death, his images make a place and time for all the suffering and fun, comedy and tragedy that can possibly fit between these shared beginnings and repeated ends.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Back of the body: John Coplans’ matter-of-fact, black-and-white photographs of his lower back are both intimate and anonymous, autobiographical and impersonal. Enlarged to about twice his actual size, and repeated in 17 variations, the 72-year-old artist’s most recent body of work is the most intriguing and sophisticated he has made. Twelve examples are displayed at Asher/Faure Gallery.

Coplans has been photographing his hairy, sagging flesh for the past 10 years. After gaining recognition as an accomplished abstract painter in the ‘50s, the London-born artist abandoned painting and moved to San Francisco in 1960, where he taught art and became founding editor of Artforum.

He served as gallery director at UC Irvine (1965-67), senior curator at the Pasadena Art Museum (1967-1970), editor-in-chief of Artforum (1971-77), and director of Ohio’s Akron Art Museum (1977-1980). When Coplans turned 60, he moved to New York and began taking pictures. Four years later, he gave up on photographing anything other than his own unremarkable, aging body.

Since then, he has used his nude body as the raw material for monumental images that resemble reductive still-lifes, abstract landscapes, or mute self-portraits. A sense of humor often comes through, as when Coplans strikes a typically feminine pose or playfully mimics the postures of famous figures from art history.

Occasionally, his photographs have failed in their attempts at mythical grandeur, such as an earlier, mural-sized series of images of his feet. Most of Coplans’ photographs, however, embody a fine balance between humility and narcissism. They create a charged tension between a withdrawn formalism and a hands-on embrace of figurative representation.

His latest series uses nudity in a compelling way, one that neither exploits exhibitionism nor incites voyeurism. The skin of his back, framed by his arms and cut horizontally in half by a windowpane-like division, constitutes the entire surface of each two-part image. Figure-ground relationships never enter the picture. Pores, folds, hairs and shadows make up the only formal incidents. They express nothing about the artist’s emotions or consciousness, but simply define an inert cartography of external appearance.

The top and bottom halves of Coplans’ photographs do not match exactly, but repeat a strip of his flesh. It is as if each piece makes you blink as you scan his back. This subtle disjunction suggests that vision never takes in everything at once. It also intimates that selves cannot be swiftly or completely comprehended.

A faceless exploration of the dumb stuff of life thus fuses with a touching acknowledgment of the body’s vulnerability. Never sentimental, his understated photographs are both openly approachable and somewhat off-putting. Their dual nature is a metaphor for individual identity: Both common and mysterious, it is shared by everyone yet experienced as unique.

Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Stages of Construction: “Six Los Angeles Muralists” at Koplin Gallery brings together the sketches, studies and maquettes used by six accomplished muralists during various stages of the construction of their highly visible projects. Also displayed are photographs of finished murals by Judy Baca, Terry Schoonhoven, Kent Twitchell, John Wherle, Richard Wyatta and the collaborative team, “East Los Streetscapers,” headed by David Botello and Wayne Healy.

If the exhibition is meant to offer insights into the complex process of transferring human-size images to a monstrous scale that dwarfs billboards, its scattered selection of drawings and reproductions sheds little light on these feats of engineering. What the viewer is presented with instead is an impressive group of souvenirs of events and mementos of experiences that transpired elsewhere.

The problem with the exhibition derives only in part from the intrinsic differences between the intimacy of the private gallery and the public, in-the-street character of murals. If the gallery had been set up more like a tourist information center, it would have more successfully served the purposes of the murals.

Maps pointing out mural locations, and wall labels with facts and anecdotes about their subjects and construction would add immensely to the exhibition. In fact, the ideas and themes raised by “Six Los Angeles Muralists” would be better addressed in book form. A comprehensive catalogue of photographs, working sketches and statements by the muralists would do everything the exhibit does, without falsely endowing its objects with the mystique of High Art.

As it stands, the show suffers from trying to fit murals into a contemporary gallery context. Although the desire to elevate the genre of wall painting is understandable, even laudatory, it ends up being condescending. Murals do not need to be validated by galleries to be taken seriously for what they are: sociological phenomena that add timely color to the changing urban environment.

Koplin Gallery, 1438 Ninth St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956, through Jan. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Loud and Squeaky Clean: Loud colors and flimsy things come together with peculiar ruthlessness in John Souza’s lean, squeaky-clean and overheated installation at Sue Spaid Fine Art. Titled “Ephemascu-Gendoll,” his coolly perverse conflation of 3-D graphic design and cruelly manipulated assemblages pretends to extinguish the need for human feeling.

Pent-up sentiments and nearly suffocated emotions, however, prove to be extremely resilient. They scream throughout Souza’s perverse collection of rubber outfits, slick pictures, synthetic device and odd collages, giving his high-pitched, multimedia work a paradoxically gripping resonance.

His installation resembles a boutique for cyborgs. The walls of the gallery have been perfectly painted in precisely uneven bands whose shocking colors could not be more unnatural or dissonant. Although their names--such as melon, grape, lime green, peach and olive--make them sound edible, their effect is that of indigestion, of overload and nausea caused by being helpless to stop oneself from consuming.

Highlights of Souza’s futuristic store include fetishistic objects seemingly designed for robots: cans of aerosol spray festooned with images of candy canes; fluorescent yellow hoses connected to bottles, swim fins and funnels; and a decal-like painting of a blow-up doll stuck in a device designed to prevent one’s car from being stolen.

Souza’s superficially mindless installation makes clear that Pop art’s romance with modern commodities was equally driven by nightmarish fears. Warhol’s flirtation with the idea that untidy emotions might be eliminated takes chilling form in “Ephemascu-Gendoll,” reminding us that the interface between humans and machines still elicits dread and pain.

Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Jan. 31. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.