ART REVIEWS : Latin America Survey: From Wit to Angst

A survey of contemporary Latin American paintings (and a few sculptures) at Chac Mool Gallery is instructive for those unfamiliar with the vastly diverse work that has come out of this region over the last 30 years. Some of the names are well-known in this country.

Fernando Botero, whose Gargantuan statues currently grace Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, is represented here by several paintings, all of which show off his talents to better advantage. “Zubaran Pinta a Santa Dorotea” is especially witty, and not a little courageous: a portrait of a stout painter in a red dressing gown painting a stout model swathed in fuchsia, and on the easel, a collaged reproduction of Zurbaran’s distinctly more sober masterpiece.

Also well-known in the United States are Roberto Matta’s fantastically tortured, architectonic “inscapes” (his name for an internal landscape). An image of a flower displays the same frantic anti-scientism; it is nicely balanced by one of Rufino Tamayo’s serene but ironic landscapes of 1963, an over-scaled work that depicts a plane on a patchwork landing field.

The British-born Surrealist Leonora Carrington, who has lived and worked in Mexico for decades, is one of the two female artists included in this show. As always her work is dazzling, especially an untitled painting that makes clear her debt to Romantics like Gustave Moreau.

Generalizing about the diverse work on view is impossible, though it’s safe to say that Conceptualism is not an issue--even for an artist like Jesus Soto, who is enamored of mathematical progressions, perceptual twists and minimal forms, but on what seems to be a purely decorative level. If some things get lost in translation, Antonio Segui’s cartoony cityscapes, filled with stylized figures with missing limbs traversing paths laid out by arrows and white dotted lines, suggest that urban angst looks pretty much the same everywhere, regardless of country of origin.

* Chac Mool Gallery, 125 N . Robertson Blvd., (310) 550-6792, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Young and Spirited: “Materialwise” is not the most provocative group show around nor is it the most memorable. Nonetheless, it is worth noting for a few reasons: one, because it marks Gallery LASCA’s new commitment to show the work of younger L.A. artists in a larger-than-usual setting; and two, because of the chance to gape at Dunnieghe Slawson’s impressively fetishistic assemblages.

Slawson builds towers of what look like pantyhose, tied off like sausages or stuffed like mushrooms. Some are tightly stitched up in places, as if to conjure half-dead animals that have been miraculously saved. Others look like ceremonial spikes, and summon all manner of morbid connotations.

Like Bruce Conner’s early work, these totems want to eschew aesthetics in favor of obsession, but they are as seductive as old love letters. Colored a worked-over brown that evokes rust, dirt, sweat and dried blood, they bear the irresistible patina of somebody else’s compulsion.

The other three artists featured here also craft puns with found materials. These are less intricate than Slawson’s; some are visual, the lesser ones verbal.

Habib Kheradyar’s toilet paper rolls dipped in wax as glossy white as a new toilet are arranged in grids on the wall, their ignoble origins all but concealed by the sterile, Minimal iconography. Jeanne Patterson’s work is less Minimal than ethereal, though her roomful of tiny plastic fish, dangling from the ends of monofilament, smacks of Sandy Skoglund’s set-up photos of hallucinatory, goldfish-filled spaces.

Steve De Groodt actually wants to be funny, but his “Tires and Dice” feels too much like a Zen reading of something by Alexis Smith. It fits into the conceptual parameters of “Materialwise,” but nonetheless it’s rather foolish.

* Gallery LASCA, 3630 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 381-1525, through Saturday.