‘ANCIENT CURRENTS’ AT USC GALLERY

“Ancient Currents” at USC’s Fisher Gallery (through Oct. 18) typifies the “washing line” approach to curating that dogs most exhibits organized by theme rather than ideology or a specific formal aesthetic. In this case the washing line happens to be imagery appropriated from the ancient past, and it brings together three painters of widely varying talents who have little in common apart from the fact that they happen to fit into the schema of the show’s limited, not to mention contrived, parameters.

Building an exhibit on the premise that biblical and classical influences are as vital today as in the past has as much value as saying that painters are still interested in the landscape or the figure. The more relevant issue, surely, is why painters need to resort to historical precedent and heroic/Romantic subject matter in order to justify putting brush to canvas. Are abstraction and the modernist continuum somehow irrelevant, or inadequate to express gut-level feelings and “spiritual” values? How, given post-modernism’s penchant for stylistic pluralism, is it possible to quote historical sources without the inevitable intrusion of irony? In an age where even the integrity of the representational image is open to doubt, unquestioning exhibits such as this seem naively myopic and conceptually passe.

We are thus left with the innate quality of the work itself, which is wildly uneven at best. Curator Selma Holo has divided the gallery into three distinct historical sections, producing a linear progression from Old Testament influences (Israeli painter, Gabi Klasmer); through Greek classicism (New Yorker, Janet Stayton); to the New Testament iconography of the Greek Orthodox Church (local artist, Jim Morphesis).

Whatever one might think of his conceptual limitations, Morphesis is by far the most accomplished painter of the bunch. By drawing upon the gestural kinesis of the New York School, as well as the pictorial vocabulary of Matthias Grunewald’s altarpieces and Velazquez’s crucifixions, he at least creates images of muscular power and emotive resonance.

Klasmer’s muddled juxtapositions of biblical symbolism and cosmological transcendence, and Stayton’s derivative, Fauve-like renditions of Baroque ornamentation in formal landscapes are largely forgettable and misconceived.