Morris Re-Emerges From the Woodwork

Richard Allen Morris, the irrepressible recycler of modes and means, emerges from the woodwork once again for the second part of his retrospective exhibition, “A Sense of Place.” The first segment of the show, at the UC San Diego Mandeville Gallery in March, introduced Morris as if afresh to the city he has quietly made his home for decades.

That exhibition surveyed Morris’ rich and multifaceted oeuvre , touching on everything from his caricaturish drawings of guns to his musty assemblages and abstract paintings.

The concluding segment of the exhibition, at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art Downtown (838 G St., second floor) through July 3, focuses on a single body of work, a series of totemic structures made from the wooden remains of the artist’s downtown studio, razed to make way for a new building.

This forest of forms embodies a host of literal and metaphoric meanings and demonstrates again and again that what looked useless to the wrecking ball had plenty of life left to live, in the right hands.

Morris’ constructions speak of persistence. One decrepit beam, standing tall on its shoddy base, bears the title, “I Shall Rise Again,” a promise Morris seems already to have fulfilled with this rejuvenation of materials forced into early retirement.

Such worn, eroded surfaces are pushed aside here in Southern California as a matter of course for the slick, ageless veneer of granite and glass. Morris’ forms not only lament this phenomenon but challenge it, by monumentalizing the debris and exposing its persistent character and potential.

Weather and time alone create the richly textured surfaces of Morris’ forms, with their peeling paint, splintered corners and rusty nails. Making poetry of the everyday, Morris transforms these discards into elegant formal statements, often odes to fellow artists.

In “Giacometti’s Door,” Morris dedicates a sliver of a door--handle and latch intact--to the artist whose elongated figurative sculptures share the same absolute, self-contained vertical presence.

“Up the Coast” pays tribute to the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn through its clean combination of vertical and angled beams, while “For Philip Guston” translates into three dimensions the blocky, patterned shapes of Guston’s paintings.

A slight sadness peeks through occasionally in this show, a fatalistic resignation to the forces of modernity. But Morris’ delight in the nuances of the everyday environment always wins out, charging the forms with a vitality and energy that defies their mundane, defeated origins.

The Thomas Babeor Gallery’s (7470 Girard Ave.) current show features a triumvirate of artists, two Southern Californians and one Italian.

John Millei of Los Angeles presents dozens of small, separately framed works on paper, hung in two tight clusters on opposite walls. While this manner of display diffuses attention throughout the grouping, each individual image commands a focused concentration on one simple, central form--a circle, an oval, the intersection of two lines or the implied meeting of four.

Reduced to the most basic of geometric elements and painted in earthen colors, the images are invested with a physical absoluteness, as if Millei were merely retracing the lines and shapes that had etched themselves quite early on our collective memory.

San Diegan Jay Johnson sheathes wood in metal in his new wall constructions, giving the scrap forms a veneer of elegance. Several of the constructions, painted black and white, spill down the wall in a careful tumble of disc, crescent, lozenge and bottle shapes. The most evocative group, covered in copper with a richly streaked patina, are no less refined but are free of the calculating slickness that limits the others. These single, chunky forms protrude 5 or 6 inches off the wall at tenuous angles, their contours a conjunction of graceful curves and sharp corners.

The concise titles--”Hold,” “Sink,” “Speak”--neither describe nor explain the ambiguous shapes, but simply reinforce their suggestion of a suspended state of being.

Turin-based painter Nicola De Maria infuses his small canvases with sweet pinks, blues and luminous whites. Colored dots scattered across the surfaces are linked by a scribbled network of pencil lines that cut shallow gorges into the layers of pigment. The markings, cast with a spirited automatism, hint of constellations, and the paintings themselves suggest an innocent’s playful mapping of celestial space.

The exhibitions continue through June 30.