A Mix of the Irrational and Elegance in Sommer Works

At PaceWildenstein MacGill, Frederick Sommer flirts with perversity. So do any number of others who call themselves artists, but Sommer refuses to court shock, much less to pander. This makes him unique, especially within the history of the avant-garde.

After 50 years, one might think this venerated photographer had exhausted his idiom of choice, which has something to do with incongruities doubling as seamless wholes, with intricacy and with nostalgia, purged of emotion and mined for form. That he hasn’t is tonic for cynics among us.

Sommer has long been enamored of Surrealism, in particular its enchantment with the irrational. This shows in the latest works on view: collages of 19th century medical illustrations, cut up and rearranged so their information devolves into pure fancy.

These are breathtakingly odd, in no small part because their high nonsense-quotient is all but eclipsed by their elegance. Yet there is something classical about them, as well: the refined blacks and whites, for example, or the random bits of flayed torso, a la Renaissance master Antonio Pollaiuolo.

Not so the earliest works on view, however, which are photographs of chicken parts dating from the late 1930s. On sheets of white paper vaguely marbled by chicken juices, Sommer creates tableaux that would evoke mayhem if they weren’t so painstakingly orchestrated. Not that Sommer is above humor: Here are eyeballs carried in beaks; a tiny liver dangling from a bloody string; and one poor chicken, with a piece of flesh draped over one eye, done up like a widow in mourning--presumably for her hacked-off body.

Also included are a series of photographs from the 1950s, produced by sandwiching oil paint between two sheets of cellophane and projecting light through the semi-translucent surface onto photographic paper. The exquisite abstractions that result, in which one can read bubbles, streaks and wrinkles of light, rival the collages for formal inventiveness. Unlike the latter, however, they are too rarely seen, making this show a must.

* PaceWildenstein MacGill, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 205-5522, through Jan. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Vintage Color: One of the most luscious things I’ve seen this season is a 1930s-era glamour shot by Alfred Cheney Johnson in G. Ray Hawkins Gallery’s current exhibition of vintage color photographs. An early carbro-color print, it is rife with technical problems: The model’s skin, glimpsed beneath a black veil, is a strange shade of orange; the mirror in her compact reflects a field of cerulean blue; and her powder puff is inexplicably lavender. No matter. Accidentally, but brazenly surreal, “Woman in Red” incarnates Andre Breton’s idea of convulsive beauty.

Color photography was legitimized as art only as late as the 1970s, thanks largely to William Eggleston’s fantastically lurid shots of Graceland. Before that, color was deemed the province of amateurs--or worse yet, the marketplace. The folly of such institutional puritanism becomes clear here, in the company of all manner of amazing hybrids.

Take Alexandre Johnson’s type-C color photographs of a garden party at Esther Williams’ house (circa 1948). Shot, one presumes, for publicity purposes, the image’s relentless geometries sneak up on you; but once fathomed, they are as ostentatious as the movie star’s color-coded Beverly Hills spread.

Johnson’s work is coy, but Paul Outerbridge Jr.’s is sublime. His color photographs of the 1930s and ‘40s were produced as advertisements or as illustrations for magazine articles. Yet with their chromatic harmonies and obsessive details (as in a pinwheel of sliced sandwiches whose effervescing lettuce leaves are echoed in the curves of a straw hat), these images are as devastating as his better-known black-and-white compositions.

The show is filled with such gems--among them, George H. Seeley’s shimmering 1907 autochromes, which seem quite three-dimensional, and Dmitri Baltermants’ surprisingly genteel, Pop-inspired propaganda of the 1960s.

* G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558, through Jan. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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‘Pig’ Mania: Antonio Mendoza’s paintings at Newspace sound silly, though in fact they’re not. “Pig Marquesa,” which depicts a smiling swine’s head atop a graceful figure in period froufrou, would be perfect fodder for a Miss Piggy calendar. Except that it isn’t really all that cute.

For that matter, it isn’t a parody either, which would seem to be the other alternative--as demonstrated in the work of well-known allegorists Hieronymus Bosch, Honore Daumier and George Orwell. Which is to say if Mendoza went the tried-and-true route, these would be political tracts about portraiture and power, or some such thing.

He doesn’t, and these aren’t; they aren’t nearly passionate enough.

Heroically scaled and done up accordingly, “Pig Marquesa” is strangely blank. Likenesses of the Chihuahua King, the Moose de Alba, the Duck Menina and the Ram Woman are silhouetted against romantic landscapes or cool interiors. These paintings are equally affectless, despite the coy art historical references and the expertly wielded brush.

What the works in fact resemble are queries about systems of classification, not-so-subtle variations upon a theme or experiments in comparative anatomy: How do you squeeze a pig’s neck into a ruffled frock or a ram’s shoulders into an Empire-line gown? It’s not particularly surprising that Mendoza has a bachelor of arts in Semiotics from Brown University. What is surprising is how compelling his cool, mix-and-match animal paintings are.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Saturday.

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Then There Was Light: When one talks of paintings that glow, it’s usually a figure of speech. Not so with Richard Godfrey’s paintings at Patricia Correia Gallery, however, works whose slick battalion of effects depend upon the use of fluorescent lights.

These lights are concealed behind the projecting black frames of the three massive monochromes on view--one red, one green and one blue. No question, the set-up makes for spectacular images, the light creating a pulsating halo at the edge of the color fields.

But I wouldn’t call the experience a meditative one. It’s a stretch to call it anything more than a special effect. And calling it a special effect may be a stretch in itself, for what’s all that special about using light to create the effect of light? It seems to me that Mark Rothko had a much tougher problem.

More interesting are the 27 smaller paintings across the room, arranged in three horizontal rows of nine. Each one consists of separate pieces of painted wood: a central black rectangle laid on top of a color field. (Godfrey knows how to pick colors: butterscotch, aqua, pale green, etc.) The whole is covered with a thick coat of varnish, transforming it into a single object, much in the manner of Allan McCollum’s “Surrogate Paintings.”

That’s not the interesting part. Rather, the halo of light that Godfrey paints around the black rectangle is, because it transforms these pretty average serial images into seductive trompes-l’oeil.

* Patricia Correia Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-1760, through Jan. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.