LA CIENEGA AREA

John Mottishaw’s painted wood and bronze sculptures exude an eerie, back-woodsy ambiance that evokes both the naivete of folk art and the “mystical” Dada of James Surls or William T. Wiley. His usual willowy, free-standing abstract forms have begun to evolve into a more muscular, figurative statement, utilizing both gallery wall, loose structural frameworks and overt psychological narrative to play out his habitual themes of human interaction and sexual drive.

Mottishaw’s chief pictorial device is the fool, a stylized, almost archetypal character who represents man’s quest for truth and love regardless of social ridicule. The artist explores this theme in a series of dream-like scenarios, where Jungian symbology and dislocated narratives create loose dualities that are part allegory, part free-form satire. Birds, serpents, hands, trees and snaking, vine-like tendrils isolate or envelope the “human” forms in order to set up a series of clear dialectics, whether in the form of the alter ego, conscious and subconscious dichotomies, or contradictions between linkage and separation.

The work’s main weakness lies less in its thematic concerns, which are ambiguous enough to encourage participation and interpretation, but rather in that sticky area that lies between folk art tradition (with its connotations of fetish and psychological icon) and the language of modernism. Fusing the two vocabularies is difficult, not only because modernism predicates a formal sophistication that “primitivism” belies, but also because we tend to be suspect of any oeuvre that raises allegory or subjective metaphor over the purity of the self-contained object. Mottishaw tries to have it both ways--naif and intellect, rational symbolist and sophistic shaman--and the mix never quite gels into a convincing whole. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to Aug. 23.)