Art Review

Back and Forth: “Herringbone + Houndstooth,” Jim Isermann’s handsome new sculpture at Richard Telles Fine Art, once again demonstrates this artist’s exceptional ability to make deceptively simple, handcrafted objects that masterfully balance the competing interests of form, texture and complex surface patterns. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun to look at.

Isermann’s art always gives your eyes something to play with. Here, two six-sided cubes, each several feet high and wide, are mounted at an angle so that they look like a pair of dice frozen in mid-tumble. Each side is woven from strips of wood covered in upholstery-like fabrics, whose bright, kitschy patterns recall kitchen-curtain calicoes, purple and green camouflage and those horrid, pointy-collared Greg Brady shirts whose thrift-store resurgence has, alas, returned them to fashion.

Although the fundamental material is the same, each fabric’s pattern has been translated in strikingly different ways. Isermann creates variations on their motifs by alternating a crisscross, herringbone weave on one cube with a houndstooth design made from small, broken-check grids on the other.

This makes the sculpture impossible to view in a single glance. Instead, you must weave yourself in and around the two cubes to take in the full effect. Sometimes a pattern will pop out right away, other times it takes longer for your eye to nudge something coherent out of the chaos. Like an optical illusion, one arrangement will assert itself and then just as suddenly recede, as background elements jostle for your attention.

The result is a fascinating visual conversation that sends your head bobbing back and forth between each piece and propels your entire body into motion. Isermann’s system of checks and balances skirts your attempts to visually resolve what you see in neat and orderly ways. Instead, you find yourself sashaying between equally enticing possibilities, part of a giddy square dance of pattern, vibrant color and ebullient movement.

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* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through May 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.