ART REVIEWS : Survey of Sam Francis Dazzles With Color

At Manny Silverman Gallery is a fine selection of the paintings of renowned artist Sam Francis, who died last year at the age of 71. The hagiographic nature of this exhibition is made clear from the outset: At the front door is a glass case much like a reliquary, which contains the artist’s paint-spattered tennis shoes, notebooks and brushes.

This kind of dramaturgy is unfortunate, and very much detracts from Francis’ art, which since the 1950s has been determinedly anti-romantic.

Though Francis owes a great deal to Jackson Pollock, his work has long eschewed the kind of romantic pathos and moody intensity that characterizes the latter’s famous drip paintings. The colors of Francis’ abstract, mural-sized canvases are uniformly jubilant--reds, blues, yellows, pinks and purples.

What’s more, Francis’ handling seems less about the heroic gesture than the dazzling materiality of paint. Applied in drips, splashes, spatters and sweeps, so that it seems to linger around the corners and at the edges of Francis’ characteristically cool expanses of white space, paint carries little metaphorical weight here. It speaks only for its own tendency to meander, flit about or stop short in a painterly huff.

Francis’ later work doesn’t abandon the calligraphic flourishes and colorful marginalia that made him famous. But one large-scale painting from 1988 suggests the extent to which the artist began to give in to the decorative impulse he typically held in check--if just barely.

This untitled image is quite a bit like a two-dimensional carnival: all light, color and riotous motion. The large disks of color suggest balloons; the flying specks of paint allude to confetti; the stained patches of purple and red play out a kind of spin-art vernacular. One suspects that seeing too many paintings of this type might diminish their impact or trivialize them entirely.

Curated very intelligently and lovingly, this small survey doesn’t make the error of packing the room. For new audiences, it is a fine introduction to Francis’ work; for longtime fans, a respectful summation of a distinguished career.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Unnatural Urges: The sweet stench of death hovers over Gregory Crewdson’s new photographs at Ruth Bloom Gallery. Crewdson continues his painstakingly precise dissection of the suburban taste for nature--that is, nature controlled and packaged as palatable hobby material, interior design accessory or multihued and multi-textured backdrop for the continuing non-drama of white flight.

This translates into lusciously colored and hallucinatorily crisp tableaux of wide-eyed birds, insects, squirrels and butterflies--all dead, of course, borrowed from the taxidermist’s lab--doing strange things just outside someone’s lovely floral-draped bedroom window or a little farther away, within eyeshot of someone else’s equally lovely dream home.

A group of robins presides over a circle of eggs, as if it were a prayer circle or the setting for a Satanic ritual. A massive, liquefying cocoon punctured by blood-red gashes and a swarm of tubular insects hovers ominously in the bushes. Electric-blue butterflies flutter around dangling braids of voluptuous blond hair--a horrific sexual fantasy that lies somewhere between the tale of Rapunzel and John Fowles’ “The Collector.”

Set up as dioramas in the artist’s studio, these photographs have the look of elaborate, natural history museum displays organized by half-mad curators or studio sets hyper-designed by the likes of David Lynch--with an eye toward the insanity lurking just beneath that which purports to be normal. The cinematic reference is underscored by Crewdson’s suffocatingly voyeuristic camera angle--generally at worm’s-eye level.

Crewdson is, not surprisingly, the son of a psychoanalyst. His images put one in mind of the title of a recent book about psychoanalysis by theorist Slavoj Zizek: “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan, but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock.”

* Ruth Bloom, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through April 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.