ART REVIEW : EXPLORING EMOTIONAL CONNECTIONS IN ‘SPIRITS’

Hello there. I know you. You’re an idea.

You’ve made yourself scarce recently, but I’d recognize you anywhere, even in an art gallery.

Just because you call yourself “Kindred Spirits” and you’ve settled into the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park (through June 1) doesn’t mean you’re incognito. You’re about as inconspicuous as a Mondrian painting at the Frick Collection.

No offense. The Muni is one of the few local showplaces with a history of nurturing ideas. All I meant by that crack is that you can’t pose as an ordinary art show.

As Ed Ruscha would say, “You ain’t no retrospective.” With 18 artists at your command, you’re a group show, but no one can mistake you for a historical survey or one of those assemblies strung together with a style, a material or subject matter.

The artists don’t belong to the same club. In fact, some of them didn’t even know each other until they were rounded up as “Kindred Spirits.”

By joining, say, Leland Rice’s ethereal photographs of studio walls with Larry Bell’s coated glass cubes, the show emphasizes that art doesn’t have to echo the same material, style or subject to share a sensibility. “Kindred Spirits” also says that emotional connections can be more interesting and important than formal or physical ones.

We knew that, but it’s intriguing to see the work displayed this way. It’s as if the lids had been taken off the art world’s cubbyholes and the art had been set free to find its soul sisters and brothers.

Janet Tholen’s iridescent, mixed-media reliefs of buildings have taken up residence with a little family that might have been raised in the steamy shadow of Teotihuacan or Chichen Itza. Tholen’s work seems all of a piece with Deanna de Mayo’s sizzling orange and green paintings and Luis Bermudez’s ceramic sculptures. They all draw inspiration from the archeology of ancient cultures, possibly Central or South American.

Painter Joyce Treiman and sculptor John Frame might seem an odd couple if the exhibited examples didn’t accentuate their flair for the dramatic and the dynamic. Tragicomic figures spill out of both bodies of work, and Treiman’s mergers of paintings with little bronze figures (from the ‘60s) could be precursors of Frame’s carved tableaux.

Architecture has been transformed in many artworks, among them Helen Lundeberg’s abstractions of the early ‘70s and Shirley Bleviss’ color photographs of cropped buildings. On the face of it, this is a look-alike pair--all blue-gray tones, sharp angles and hard edges. A fundamental reserve also links the work but doesn’t hide a major difference: Lundeberg invests her painting with a subtle measure of mystery and equivocal space, while Bleviss is a far more ordinary artist, using the ready-made design of architecture to make striking compositions.

Painter John McLaughlin and photographer Lewis Baltz also meet at an architectonic juncture, but what connects them is more than straight lines and flat surfaces; it’s a rigorous and highly principled austerity.

This show doesn’t operate according to a formula. Joining Peter Levinson’s black cutouts with Mari Andrews’ drawings calls attention to their predilection for skeletal forms. But the pairing of Linsley Lambert’s spectral drawings of hairless heads with Karl Gernot Kuehn’s eerie black-and-white photographs of Los Angeles’ streets and buildings accentuates a mood of spooky isolation.

“Kindred Spirits” seems to run amok amid a trio of trompe l’oeil artists. Their passion for sublimating material to an image is a common interest, but that translates as a mechanical similarity rather than an emotional one.

Dan Douke’s paintings that emulate slabs of rusty metal, Sam Wilson’s drawings that look like collages and Richard Shaw’s ceramic sculptures of such mundane objects as books, scissors and brown-wrapped packages just don’t give off the same vibrations. Douke is an abstractionist at heart, Wilson edges toward narratives and Shaw updates the still life tradition.

No one else is likely to carp about their inclusion, though, because their work is so much fun to look at, which makes me suspect that the exhibition may be on target here too. Despite the disparate look and feel of their work, there’s something about the density of visual information that makes the artists kindred spirits.