Review: Dario Escobar plays it too safe at Craft & Folk Art Museum

Dario Escobar’s site-specific installation at the Craft & Folk Art Museum begins as a gentle lure on the stairway leading up to the second-floor gallery.

Red plastic bicycle reflectors, each an arc about 9 inches long, are mounted on the wall and linked to create lines of force flowing with forward momentum. Inside the gallery, a thousand of the reflectors stream across the walls in sinuous swirls and eddying curls.

Escobar has been included in several group shows in Southern California, but “Broken Circle,” guest-curated by MOCA’s Alma Ruiz, is the Guatemalan artist’s first solo museum appearance in L.A.

His work attempts to braid conceptual rigor, material vitality and social critique, but the strands don’t always come together tightly. The accretion of plastic objects in the show might say something about mass production or consumerism, but nothing acute. The installation is limited to a light and pleasant affair, an ode to lyrical, ornamental line.

Designed for safety purposes to attract attention, to catch the eye, the reflectors continue to do their job out of context. They make a snazzy graphic medium. Their surfaces, alive with reflective shimmer, respond satisfyingly to the viewer’s shifting position.

Two sculptures from Escobar’s “Crash” series (both 2010), resting on the gallery floor, round out the show. Made from re-chromed car bumpers, they rely for their charge on the implication of violent impact, but visually, their blow is too soft to matter.

Craft & Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 937-4230, through Aug. 24. Closed Mondays. www.cafam.org