ART REVIEW : MIND-ETCHING VISIONS BY REGISTER, RICHARDS

The Laguna Art Museum’s temporary outpost at South Coast Plaza currently offers two batches of realistic images that set the mind to wandering. It’s a purposeful trip, for both John Register and Bruce Richards know what they are doing.

Register’s meticulous oils, depicting deserted interiors and misty views beyond them, evoke memories of an earlier America in a tone of Hopper-like estrangement. Only one person appears in the seven paintings shown, and he is a soft silhouette, walking away from us in “L.A. Hotel.”

We see four leather-upholstered chairs staring out a view-less window in “Cadillac Hotel,” a glistening row of unoccupied red booths in a diner, an empty railroad dining car overlooking a rail yard and a distant building. These are man-made spaces devoid of people--generally dark interiors that open through windows to bleached exteriors.

Register gives us lots of room to explore his crisp shadows, planes of soft light and smartly structured compositions, but he also traps us in the endless space of lonely introspection.

On the face of them, Richards’ paintings, prints and watercolors of objects isolated on vast, empty spaces are simpler. But in fact there’s nothing easy about them. Coupled with suggestive titles, they are loaded with associations and moral judgments. Among the 24 works (many repeating familiar motifs and including pieces shown before) are pristine depictions of burning matches, wishbones, kernels of corn, a basket of eggs, pocket watches, a heart-shaped locket and a rabbit’s foot. Symbolically laden with connotations of chance, time and fragility, they present a precarious world of emotional, psychic and physical danger.

A house of cards, called “Modern Living,” could collapse from the force of a whisper. A sledge hammer, painted along with four delicate flies on a dark canvas, is a striking reminder of overkill and senseless violence. Not surprisingly, it’s called “Terrorists.” Richards paints such things as if they were exceedingly precious; as it turns out they are. The ideas that reverberate in his work are not to be taken lightly.

The show runs through July 26.