ART REVIEW : THERE’S NO SHOWING OFF IN ‘SETTING THE STAGE’

Art keeps trying to be something other than what it was. One week it adds a sound track to itself, the next it wants to transmogrify into architecture. At the moment, over at the County Museum of Art, painting takes on trappings of theater. The exhibition, called “Setting the Stage,” involves four lesser-known artists and continues on view to Feb. 16.

It is the debut organizational effort of the museum’s new curator of contemporary art, Howard Fox. The shy, literary and slightly homely quality of the show suggests a curator coming on with quietly offbeat obliqueness rather than blockbuster bluster. No great claims are made for the exercise other than to demonstrate that some otherwise fairly conventional artists are trying to tune in to new expressive dimensions by paying close attention to the physical environment where their work is placed, lit and otherwise deployed.

Modest as this proposition is, it still has to find its place between the polite theatricality of the most traditional exhibition installation and the truly radical use of gallery space already established by artists from Robert Irwin to Judy Pfaff. That context sets the stage for the realization that the leitmotif here is caution . The subtextual image created is that of a little band of graduate art students plucking up the courage to do something a little bit different .

Tom Leeson seems to be about equally in love with the cotton-candy cherubs of the Baroque and the whacked-out nuttiness of vintage film comedians. There is something of Harpo Marx in his three big wall installations. All pursue the Old Master cliche of grandiose paintings in homage to the local prince, who rises in glory festooned in garlands by putti airborne in spite of being adorably chubby.

Leeson covers walls in cut-out cupids or a painting fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Except that his “ruler” is a 6-inch measuring device garlanded in tape measure and his context is the contemporary artist gone dotty. His best work is titled “The Anxiety of the Influence of a New Studio on Old Work,” which manages to be as goony-philosophical as a William Wylie without Wylie’s sarcasm.

Leeson brings up an old wonder. How could great artists have so shamefully flattered their patrons with straight faces? Did Tiepolo smirk behind his brush as he glorified Klaus, Third Elector of Bad Schlecter? Leeson suggests that he may have, but what really mattered was that these silly subjects gave the artist the chance to do his thing, to paint, which Leeson does with energetic vengeance. Cherubs are slathered in bouquets of fat thrusts, gently stroked with celestial washes, decorated with little flowers, checked, crosshatched and framed in aluminum strips that follow their complex outlines.

It’s a display of good-hearted virtuosity that quite outstrips its own limitations.

San Diego artist Patricia Patterson is familiar as the maker of installations that evoke the spirit of a little Irish town called Kilmurvey where she lives every summer. At the museum she presents a work custom-made for the space. A gaggle of lettered phrases, letters and song lyrics plus large paintings of Irish horses, ladies gossiping in the kitchen over tea, a man at work and--rather oddly--divers caught in midair are interspersed with a real stove and mantel set on bright, checkered linoleum floors.

The general style throughout suggests poster-paint decorations for a high school gym dance, bright, upbeat and unbearably tacky. Patterson appears to celebrate Irish life and, by extension, the simple life everywhere. But her texts leave no doubt of tragic foundations beneath the twittering, pedestrian surface or of the suffocating narrowness of an unadorned existence. The work is like a short story by James Joyce where he evokes everything terrible about Dublin while never uttering an unpleasant word. The result is both masterful and creepy.

Leeson and Patterson will certainly not achieve apotheosis as radical innovators, but their work is clear, well-crafted and resonant with a certain maturity.

The case for Randy Hayes and Edward Knippers is murkier.

Knippers, who lives in Arlington, Va., appears hoist on the exhibition’s theme. He presents 10 large figurative expressionist paintings on the theme of the Crucifixion. One gets the notion that he paints very effectively in the anguished accents of Chaim Soutine, using big, anxious, ropy strokes to hack out figures of venal kings, brutal guards, a distraught child and the flayed Christ hanging in midair. The problem is that work is crammed into a gallery scarcely larger than a flophouse hotel room. Undoubtedly this was done to heighten the impact of the work, but its effect is claustrophobic and irritating. You can’t step back far enough to bring the pictures into objective focus, so you feel like you’ve been cornered by some burly bozo who’s ranting in your face. Knippers’ “different” installation is sophomoric and self-defeating.

The prospects for Randy Hayes are even less glowing. He presents life-size figures of prizefighters cut out in silhouette and hung spotlighted against slate-black walls. Beginning with boxing ring ropes awkwardly truncated, everything about these works suggests an art that has not yet discovered its identity. Although these pugilists look like paintings--roughly in the colored-light generalities employed by Wayne Theibaud--they are rendered in pastels. Perhaps inspired by the delicacy of the medium, the whole is then covered in clear acrylic sheet cut to the shapes.

That suggestion of incipient sculpture reinforces a hint that these works want to come off the wall and inhabit the gallery space. Well, why not? There are ways to get them out there, all the way from using standing cutouts to rendering three-dimensional figures. Hayes’ work is that of a tough/sentimental realist who has yet to think through the implications of his aesthetic.