ART REVIEW : Point of View Seems a Little Hazy at South Coast Plaza Group Show

Short-cut recipe for a group art show: Visit artists’ studios, select work and hang. At the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza gallery the missing ingredient is a point of view.

Not that curators ought to try to shoe-horn art into neat little “themes.” But the remark in the exhibit brochure that “the exhibition contains less of a unifying thread than an eclecticism which mirrors our society and the art world” is the laziest of rationales for creating an exhibit.

That brochure essay is uncredited, although the curator of the exhibit was former museum director William Otton. In light of the fact that Otton has just been appointed president of the Art Institute of Southern California, it’s worth pointing out that six of the seven artists are current or former teachers at the Laguna Beach institution.

At least no one can accuse them of looking over each other’s shoulders.

Javier P. Alvarez does charcoal and graphite portraits of people with unnaturally large hands (it’s hard to tell whether this feature is intentional) that tend to droop over the arms of the chairs in which they sit. Pamme F. Turner turns out jaunty earthenware pieces, one of them painted with a lite Grecian theme: a panpiper in a polka dot toga and a ponytailed lass looking expectantly upward.

Nancy Mooslin translates musical notes into chromatic “scales” stippled closely over a rag or wood surface. A cramped little color key at the bottom of each painting matches hue to note, though not in a very illuminating way. An aural component might move this small-scale work into a more complex and rewarding realm.

Antoinette Geldun takes photographs of women and boys who reveal a sort of moist vulnerability. In “Portrait Series No. 13,” for example, a petite black woman whose body is folded like a dancer, stares with round, luminous eyes, an earring winking in one ear. The one clinker is “Triptych No. 2,” in which Geldun’s nude vamping is too pallidly imitative of an attitude popularized by such well-known photographers as Judith Golden.

Jonathan Burke paints brightly colored still lifes in harsh sunlight that gilds each item with equal ferocity. Textures are not at issue here, which means that some things--like the orange pieces in “Still Life with Parakeet”--have the generalized, artificial look of objects pictured on old-fashioned billboards.

Greg Miller combines photo-blowups of Famous Old Art (Leonardo’s “Madonna of the Rocks,” say) with single images from Famous Modern Art (mostly by Gauguin) in large paintings. A variation on this theme, “Woman Chipping Coconuts,” mates a Gauguin figure of a woman wielding a hatchet with triplet images of Elvis Presley. Although there seems to be a fierce ambition at work here (“appropriation” being a hot word in the art world these days), the juxtapositions seem forced rather than revelatory of anything in particular.

Linda Kallan creates highly subtle color blends within the arbitrary expanses of a bleak, architectural geometry. In an untitled painting, a fragment of a building painted in the rich, weathered colors of a Renaissance fresco, a pale pathway and a churning area of blue, yellow and magenta shimmer on the border of abstraction and dreamscape. When Kallan goes astray, as in “Red Shadow,” the geometry is too bulky and drab to support the richness of the color.

On view in a separate exhibition are eight recent paintings by Astrid Preston, whose eye transforms placid domestic landscapes into mystical territories that blur and glow as if seen by a nearsighted sensualist.

In these works, the eye glides past wide-angle panoramas of trees and bushes reminiscent of the expectant stillness of the grassy park in “Blow Up” and finds the smug serenity of home and hearth. In her night scenes, Preston plays the welcoming warmth of blazing electric light against the dimly glimpsed shapes of surroundings so well-known by day, so suddenly terror-filled by night.

The museum has seen fit to assign the Preston brochure to Orville O. Clarke Jr., “critic and art historian,” whose attempt at explaining the work bogs down in a jumble of cliches and left-field comparisons. The day that the powers that be at the Laguna Art Museum realize the importance of literate publications by strongly credentialed individuals, the institution’s stock in the art world is sure to rise.

“Recent Works: California Artists” and “California Contemporary Artists 38: Astrid Preston” remain on view through Dec. 27 at the Laguna Art Museum satellite at South Coast Plaza. Hours are weekdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (open until 8 p.m. Thursdays); Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Admission: free. For more information: (714) 494-8971.