Art Review

Flowing Words: At Ace Gallery, Ian Hamilton-Finlay’s charmingly elliptical neon poems flaunt their populist aspirations, but it’s not hard to see that they’re elitist at heart.

Like most text-based Conceptual art, Hamilton-Finlay’s goals are resolutely intellectual. You’re asked to think, more than you are to feel.

Luckily, even viewers who don’t catch all of Hamilton-Finlay’s references to the French Revolution can take pleasure in his clever, alphabet-soup approach to wordplay.

Titled “The Ocean and the Revolution,” the exhibition makes reference to poetry’s role in social and political upheaval, while likening a poem’s movement to the ebb and flow of environmental forms. Throughout his career the Scottish-born artist has fused text with a variety of different media, most notably sculpture, books and outdoor installations. He’s a well-known writer of concrete poetry, in which a poem’s physical shape mirrors its meaning (a poem about trees like a tree, etc.).

Hamilton-Finlay’s neon signs use language to evoke simple, water-related objects such as a net, a cloud and a wave. One sculpture spells out the words “diamond-studded fishnet” in jazzy red lettering.

In another, he intersperses an S-like mark, the proofreader’s notation to transpose two letters, between different configurations of the letters W, V, A and E, so that each combination spells out the word “wave.” A third piece translates “cloud” into French, German, Italian, Spanish and English, its white neon scrawl mirrored directly below in sky-blue.

The ambiguity of these poetic fragments, coupled with their fluid cursive lettering, evokes images of the tide’s curl, which in turn brings to mind the back-and-forth play of language itself. It’s this kind of playful reciprocity that makes Hamilton-Finlay’s words well worth wading through.

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* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 935-4411, Through March. Closed Sundays and Mondays.