ART REVIEW : Works of One Sculptor, One Painter in One Tiny Room

For the woman artist who is patiently trying to find a home for her work in the big-shouldered arena of art, it may seem wise to take advantage of even the humblest opportunities.

Sculptor Bella Tabak Feldman and painter Roberta Eisenberg are both represented by Space Gallery in Los Angeles. But only a short time ago they were still showing work in the no-frills world of obscure nonprofit galleries.

That may explain why they have allowed a few pieces of their work to be exhibited at the Fullerton College Art Gallery--a grand name for a tiny room that doesn’t even provide minimal information on the artists (no biographical data) or the work (no dates or media) and which has very restricted hours of operation.

Feldman, a Berkeley-based sculptor, has experimented with a range of styles and media during the past couple of decades. Beginning her mature career with a series of goofy animal sculptures, she moved on to investigate the allusive properties of fiberglass in large and small constructions.

Now she is working in metal, making witty table-top pieces that combine recognizable imagery with abstract form. If the quality of the delicate fiberglass sculptures lay in their surprising power, Feldman’s skill in the newer pieces is precisely the reverse: working an obdurate material with malleable, tongue-in-cheek control.

The punningly titled “Out of Egypt” is a steel pyramid extruding a colony of wavy steel cables on one side. There is something amusingly anarchic about these stiff bundles of filaments tunneling their way out of such a dense, majestic shape.

In “Poet’s Pillow,” a thick metal band with an insert of finely braided wires anchors a metal pillow to a squat metal weight. The work seems to be about the pressures on creativity (this pillow doesn’t promote restful sleep) and the task of finding room for a personal vision within the iron constraints of theme and form.

Eisenberg, who lives in Newport Beach, has also spent decades in the studio--turning out portraits and then alternating between representational and abstract styles. Now working in an abstract style with broad hints of landscape, she seems stymied by tentative ways of applying paint.

Her paintings tend to be made up of separate islands of rather constrained brush activity. The result is a certain blandness and vagueness that conveys neither a feeling of ease and flow nor a sense of struggle. What is missing is a sense of inner propulsion, a feeling that each passage exists as part of a larger vision.

“Secret Refuge” of 1985 is the closest of the works on view to figurative painting, and that is why it is also the strongest.

The painting draws the eye to a sketchily silhouetted pair of couples who sit or recline in positions reminiscent of Henry Moore’s sculptures. A huge gray-and-white treelike form in the foreground broods over a “landscape”--a central patch of black with a gray-and-white waterfall.

Emphasized with arcs of fuchsia paint, the figures create an emotional unity in this work, regardless of the fragmented quality of the scene. A suspicion persists that inside Eisenberg- the-abstract-painter is Eisenberg-the-figurative-painter, whose ideas and feelings may best be conveyed by anchoring them on tangible objects.

“ONE PAINTER, ONE SCULPTOR”

Through March 23

Fullerton College Art Gallery

321 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton

Open 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Mondays through Thursdays, or by appointment.

Information: (714) 992-7317