LA CIENEGA AREA

Ron Cooper’s exploration of the figure has been so off-beat and varied that we don’t always identify him with art’s most enduring subject. That may change with the addition of new “Portrait Lamps and Vases” to an oeuvre of torsos done in photography, ceramic and fiberglass. Or it may not, for you can examine these new bronze objects quite assiduously without seeing their connection to the people whose names they bear, such as Prince Rupert Von Lowenstein, collector Marcia Weisman and artists Jasper Johns and Brice Marden. The ridged, symmetrical forms that stand high on three legs and emit light or hold flowers appear to be nothing more than attenuated restrikes of classical vessels.

To see what Cooper is up to, you must stop looking at the objects themselves and start scanning their contours. Then you immediately discover that ridges and curves conform to facial profiles and that the lamps and vases represent the space between two identical figures that face each other. The concept of reversing negative and positive space is a standard perceptual trick--as old as art education--but it catches us off guard here because the objects appear so solid and traditional, the people so transitory.

Cooper has given the idea a fresh application by cutting a tin template of a sitter’s profile, then mounting it on a ceramist’s wheel to turn a clay mold for each bronze portrait. Defined by the space around them and treated to a dose of wit, the subjects’ sagging flesh and imperfect bone structures become solidified in bronze and ironically dignified as elements of formal decor. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to June 2.)