LA CIENEGA AREA

“The Torso” is the unifying theme of an eclectic group show featuring 11 artists working in a variety of media. Unlike the more popular genres of landscape, still life and portraiture, the torso is an oddly idiosyncratic form, replete with contradictions and ambiguity. Its stunted, limbless disfiguration suggests physical violence, sadomasochism, a sense of incompleteness. By contrast, its uniform, rounded contours are instantly familiar in their classical symmetry, at once compact, muscular, sensuous.

Less a narrative subject than a set of spatial parameters, the torso has become the jumping-off point for a wide variety of formalist studies, analyzing structure, texture and compositional balance. It is also the catalyst for a great deal of representational rhetoric, as this show clearly illustrates. Whether it be the spiritual symbolism of Craig Antrim’s atavistic icons, the kinetic flow of Jean Edelstein’s pagan dancers or the Byzantine topographies of Jim Morphesis’ double Grunwald Christs, the simple torso form is habitually imbued with metaphorical values through the basic strategies of line, texture, color and compositional resonance.

Even Jean St. Pierre’s mixed-media sculpture--with its rough-hewn tree trunk impaled with nails, spikes, gold and silver--relies substantially on metaphorical allusion, investing natural forms (a tree, like a human, has a trunk and limbs) with anthropomorphic deceits based solely on linguistic association. Significantly, Ron Cooper is represented by a pair of ceramic pieces rather than his computer abstracted torso grids, playing down the form’s abstract possibilities in favor of classical representation. Only Yves Klein, with his plaster Venus de Milo in International Blue, debunks such rhetoric by metamorphosing an art cliche into a hermetic in-joke, a triumph of subjective style over art historical substance. If only there had been more analysis such as this rather than mere reiteration of familiar stylistic devices. (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., through Saturday.)