LA CIENEGA AREA

Although many critics see the career of Charles White as an anachronism, a stubborn reaction to the mainstream of 20th-Century American and European art, therein lies his radicalism. Such a deliberate rejection of the tenets of High Modernism in favor of pictorial representation became a political act of faith, an advocacy of black consciousness, history and philosophy against the prevailing (i.e., white) aesthetic.

White absorbed the lessons of the 1930s Mexican muralists, wore his people’s suffering on his sleeve during the WPA years, then switched from overt satire and social realism to a more mature, introverted style that has been called “mythic stylization.”

This period is represented by a current exhibit of charcoal studies, preliminary sketches for some of his more well-known drawings. The works clearly evoke White’s hallmark qualities of pride, dignity and courage. The expressive faces, anatomical distortions and the abstracted chiaroscuro of the settings coalesce to create an almost mystical fusion of the American urban experience with the collective heritage of black Africa.

Whether through stolid mother figures or coolly arrogant symbols of brotherhood, White is never preachy, preferring to stress unity through the ambiguous metaphor of the game of Cat’s Cradle, a contradictory expression of freedom and manipulation. The interest of these particular studies is the looseness of their execution, White’s gestural sweep imbuing the work with a kinesis and vibrancy often lacking in his more pristine and static finished drawings.

Also on display are new paintings by White’s son, C. Ian White, which appropriate much of the father’s vocabulary--hands, revolutionary slogans--yet attempt to place it within the mainstream of recent East Village, guerrilla Pop excesses. Abstract Expressionism, assemblage and graffiti collide with the poetry of revolution (Che Guevara, a caged fist, hands gripping a rifle) to produce overwrought, cliched statements on political oppression and divided consciousness. Where are you now, Eldridge Cleaver? (Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., to March 1.)