ART REVIEW : DILL’S PREDICTABLE MODERNIST PICKLE

Since the late 1960s, Laddie John Dill has established a reputation as one of Southern California’s foremost modernists, producing a series of superbly crafted works in a variety of media that explore light and space in both environmental and architectural contexts.

More recently, however, Dill has come under considerable critical re-evaluation. He has been accused of failing to move forward, of preferring to recycle his habitual imagery in increasingly decorative and accessible formats instead of expanding either the complexity of his structures or the rigorousness of his execution.

A selective retrospective of works from 1969 to 1986, at Long Beach Museum of Art (to Sunday), specifically underlines many of these problems, reinforcing the view that Dill’s earliest output remains, at least for the moment, his most resonant.

Dill came to the fore in 1968 with his now renowned light-and-sand pieces, site-specific landscapes of sculpted sand that incorporated both concealed and visible argon tubes to create sensuous dioramas of real and reflected light. He expanded this setup into more specifically architectural realms by introducing plate glass in various progressions of geometric forms. The glass was suspended in the sand and lit from beneath to create an evocative sense of permanent twilight in which form and content, sculptural and “painterly” vocabularies were in perfect balance.

In making the switch from floor to wall, Dill replaced the liquidity of sand with the static permanence of cement. He experimented with oxidizing agents to create complex and often colorful patinas. He introduced broken shards of glass and silicon, whose transparency and crystallization into unresolved forms earned comparisons with Turner landscapes.

It was at this point, around the mid-’70s, that Dill began to rely on easy formulas. His abstraction of landscape through superimposed door-and-wedge structures began as an interesting dialectic between organic lyricism and heavy formalism. Yet the subsequent breaking-down of planar perspective, experiments with cement washes and oils and the more recent excursions into the theatrical mise en scene have proved mere wrinkles in a structural vocabulary that has become predictable with familiarity.

There are rumors that Dill is on the verge of making a significant formal change. If so, it’s both welcome and definitely overdue.