La Cienega

Since art’s inception there’s been an automatic association between massive scale--in Pharaoic effigies, Greek sculpture and Michelangelo’s “David”--and messages of power. Viola Frey is known for appropriating the moribund tradition of monumental sculpture and jostling its implications of power to form huge ceramic personages of benign grandmas or authoritarian gray-suited bureaucrats.

We walk into the current exhibition and we’re confronted by 10-foot lumbering, thick-limbed modern day kouros and kouroi made from the same glazed ceramic that typically models tiny china ballerinas. Three men in business suits and one woman in a 50’s dress-up frock stand in a semicircle, their clothing and bodies unified by quick daubs of geometric color. On the floor are equally huge nudes of a man and a woman looking like they’ve sprawled out on the gallery floor for a nap.

Frey banks on our discomfort and unfamiliarity with this scale and on the intuitive link between size and might. We begin to feel dwarfed, somatically and physically pressed upon, as if in the snare of some bigger-than-life icon like the IRS auditor, a highway patrolman looming over the driver seat or a prim aunt Mildred you don’t dare defy. That’s just when you notice that Frey intentionally wraps these giants in psychological equivocation. They look fettered rather than dressed by their clothing, their hands rise almost to their mouths in half gestures of indecision, they’re in close physical proximity but ultimately disengaged, they’ve got blank dumb stares and even the reclining nudes seem more fetal than heroic. This same ironic jockeying of scale, this same grand but mute figuration is the subject of handsome accompanying drawings. (Asher Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive to May 28.).