ART REVIEW : FOULKES’ ‘PORTRAITS’ OF CONTEMPORARY TERROR

If you want to see what’s been missing in about 90% of Neo-Expressionism, visit Llyn Foulkes’ show of “Portraits,” at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum through March 16. His horrific faces--bloody, masked or mangled--cut straight to the heart of contemporary terror as they rise from starched collars or military uniforms. Rather like automatons, these mostly anonymous men smile through the gore as they remain ever faithful to their official images.

The only instantly recognizable subject is President Reagan, portrayed as “The Golden Ruler.” Masked by a gold-painted nose-plate and ruler (both attached to his face by a single glass eye) and framed by white shutters, he’s the aging general who sends young men off to war as well as the affable leader who issues platitudes about the poor from his house in the suburbs. Blood runs down his cheeks, but he is as lifeless as a wooden Indian.

Foulkes’ portraits--18 in all, one of which includes 10 faces--ring out like pistol shots. With pummeled flesh, bandaged lumps and caverns where their noses should be, they are almost relentlessly grisly. Some people have difficulty staying in the same room with them, but there’s more than enough emotional range and artistic virtuosity here to hold aficionados’ attention. A small (9-by-7-inch) painting called “Manuel,” for example, is a simply beautiful piece of painting, so sensitive that it seems to depict a victim instead of a victimizer.

Some paintings overdraw their criticism to the brink of caricature, but “That Old Black Magic” wisely leaves much to the imagination; the face staring from a blackboard frame has white O-shapes for eyes that can be read as high-tech magnifying glasses or blinders. While “Art Official” (portraying a suited man holding a firecracker phallus) rails against a specific realm of tyranny, a relatively poetic piece called “Racing With the Moon” simply evokes a strange mood of alienation as the face dissolves into a midnight landscape.

An extraordinarily skilled craftsman, Foulkes builds these images of mixed media on wood. They look like paintings--and, in fact, are well painted--but the forms are often constructed of carefully fit wood pieces that may extend off the ground into high relief. Some of the clothing is real fabric, and frames employ (or emulate) everything from brick to honeycomb metal.

Foulkes’ portraits are so powerful that they bear almost no relationship to the bogus emotion and smart anxiety of much recent expressionistic art. Instead, they beat a path to the abyss of German Expressionism and to Goya’s black paintings. About the only major contemporary artist in league with this sensibility is Ed Kienholz--at his most unsavory. Francis Bacon’s treatment of human flesh as meat also comes to mind, but compared to Foulkes, Bacon seems an elegant lyricist if not a marshmallow.

Expressionism doesn’t have to be this unpleasant to be legitimate. When it is, the art needs more than shock value to make it authentically affecting. This is where Foulkes proves his strength. His raging social criticism skewers military-industrial values and parades them around the village square like severed heads of dictators and their puppets.