ART REVIEW : ISERMANN KNOWS HOW TO GIVE FLOWERS POWER

“When I come in here, I just start laughing. I don’t know why.”

This was the reaction of a talented local artist to the current exhibit at the Patty Aande Gallery (660 9th Ave.).

The four dozen new works by Los Angeles artist Jim Isermann, as a group entitled “Nu-Flowers,” are disarming in their ostensible simplicity and engaging in their evocation of a more naive era.

Most plentifully represented are Isermann’s “Flower Paintings,” most conventionally exhibited on the gallery walls but a few exhibited on the ceiling. Why not? They’re lamps.

Also overhead is a large “Flower Mobile,” 15 feet in diameter.

Beneath it is a “Flower Seating Group,” consisting of five nylon web chairs alternating with five tables around a central connecting table.

Elsewhere you’ll find “Flower Clocks” and “Sputnik Sconce.”

The gallery looks like a big kids’ playroom, wildly active with repeated patterns in ice cream colors, the huge mobile spinning overhead and sunflower clocks ticking on the walls.

Can this be art? Yes, indeed. It is colorful and pleasurable, even fun, fun, fun. But it is also informed in concept and serious in intent.

Listen to the artist. Isermann on numerous occasions has said: “My art is about fine art becoming popular culture and then coming back around to fine art.”

His concern is the intermeshing and mutual nourishment of high and low culture.

The works look like a recylcing of early Walt Disney images through a psychedelic kaleidoscope. Remember all those singing blossoms in Saturday matinee cartoon festivals? The acme of the form was doubtless “The Waltz of the Flowers” in “Fantasia.”

The connection to the Great Animator is appropriate because Isermann attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, which was founded with Disney dollars.

In 1982, Isermann created an installation lasting two days at Anaheim’s Inn of Tomorrow, across the street from and in sight of Disneyland’s Matterhorn. In a room, itself an artifact from the late 1950s, he assembled the work, entitled “Motel Modern,” out of both authentic pieces and simulacra of the period.

It was a far cry from the prairie-style home with a “modern” interior in the conservative Midwestern environment of Kenosha, Wis., where the artist had grown up.

“That’s the way I thought things were, modern,” he has stated. He thought life would be like that of the Jetsons, a futuristic middle-class TV cartoon family living in space.

In the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he painted pop images like 1950s cars and 45-rpm records. His conservative teachers were not sympathetic, although pop had already passed its period of greatest vitality by then.

“They never understood that you could be serious about art while having fun,” he said in a May, 1986, Artnews interview.

After graduating in 1977, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became fascinated with “the fakeness of the L.A. look.”

His obsession with the “look” inspired him to seek out its origins. He learned that 1950s biomorphic furniture, such as the kidney-shaped table, was influenced by artists like surrealists Joan Miro and Jean Arp. Modern industrial materials and techniques made them popularly available. By appreciating and copying them, as an artist he returned them to a fine art context--but now enriched by an accretion of popular culture.

The historical reference for the show at the Patty Aande Gallery is the 1960s, which Isermann, born in 1955, remembers with its motto of “Flower Power” as an age of optimism. And indeed the paintings resemble flower decals. The high art antecedents are artists as diverse as classics Henri Matisse and Alexander Calder, pop artist Andy Warhol (whose minions silkscreened a famous series of “Flower Paintings” in garish colors in the 1960s) and op artist Bridget Riley (who specializes in subtle variations in size, shape or placement of serialized units in an all-over pattern).

In contrast to Warhol, whom he once regarded as a “god,” Isermann carefully paints each of his works himself with Dutch Boy enamels on mahogany door skims. Despite the crispness of their edges, the works do indeed have a handmade look, rather like the works of other reductive artists such as Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers.

And it is as true of Isermann’s works as it is of theirs that, as Frank Stella said: “What you see is what you see.” With an addendum, however: The more you look, the more you get.

The exhibit continues through Jan. 24.