VISUAL ARTS / LEAH OLLMAN : The Human Figure Makes a Comeback in San Diego Exhibits

After an exile lasting several generations, the human figure has been fully welcomed back into art. Although many artists never gave up on recognizable renderings of the human body, their claim to the cutting edge of art had been supplanted by painterly abstraction and the crisp geometries of minimalism. When the figure did appear in pop art, it was unreal, remote, a figment of popular imagination or a facade polished for the press.

The authoritarian voice of the mass media seduces artists now more than ever, but, at the same time, the voice of the individual and the artist’s own touch have reemerged as the basis of much contemporary art.

Explicit emotion is back, and, with it, the use of the human figure as a vehicle for that emotion.

Current shows at two local college galleries demonstrate the vitality of figurative art today. At Grossmont College’s Hyde Gallery (8800 Grossmont College Drive, through Oct. 7), local artist Leslie Nemour presents an array of drawings and paintings that exaggerate emotion to the point of caricature.

Nemour’s series, “El Calor (The Heat),” derives its format and tone from the Mexican novela , a soap opera narrative thick with romance and violence. Nemour omits written dialogue from her work, and further limits the legibility of the narratives by fragmenting the figures and scenes. What she does convey, through several assemblages of small paintings and a loose mosaic of drawings that spans an entire wall, is the heated, emotionally charged atmosphere of these tales. This is what the audience craves--a respite from the tedium of their daily lives, an escape into an artificial world of constant intrigue and passion.

In “Zas,” the most effective of the works in the show, Nemour creates a comic-strip-like narrative from 20 separate images joined in a continuous horizontal band. Each represents a distilled facet of the drama--a woman’s open mouth, a man’s hand reaching toward a woman’s thigh, a backward glance, a door closing.

Although the paintings read sequentially from left to right, they follow no concrete story line. Instead, they skip rhythmically from one melodramatic moment to another. The small, condensed format of these strip paintings yields a tight, tension-filled resolution to the disparate images.

In the larger drawings, the cumulative impact of such images is diluted by the white space of the wall showing through between them. The drawings, in pastel on black paper and of varied shapes and sizes, offer a similar assortment of seductive poses, hostile confrontations and flavorful settings. Nemour draws her subjects in a brusque, sketchy style, the pastel reds, greens and yellows vibrating intensely against the black ground. The mood is unreal, and the characters, too. Faceless composites designed to represent the best of their gender, they play out their classic roles as tough or tender, violent or vulnerable.

The unsettling combination of predictability and popularity that lies at the heart of the soap opera form is captured succinctly here. Nemour offers a mild critique of the formulaic character of the novela , but in the end she--and by extension, we, too--give in to its timeless appeal.

The large pastel drawings of Long Beach artist Jeanine Breaker, at the MiraCosta College Gallery (1 Barnard Drive, Oceanside, through Sept. 30), also evoke a sense of passion and drama, but of a personal, intimate nature, rather than one of idealized convention. Breaker renders all of her figures nude, close to or larger than life-sized, and in her multipanel works, they writhe with an internal tension reminiscent of the figures of Robert Longo.

Like Longo, Breaker divulges little about the conditions calling for such twisted postures, but the spare, introspective quality of her images suggests that the positions echo internal states of mind and being. They function, like the gestures in modern dance, as pure physical expression, rich with significance and suggestion.

The triptych “Ad Utrumque Paratus” portrays a figure in the process of unfurling. In the left panel, he (though the gender is ambiguous) curls himself up like a water bug, into a ball of anguish, embarrassment and self-effacement, as if trying to become invisible to the cast of ghostly gray figures before him. In the center panel, he is only half curled, his legs bent out behind him, his head to the ground.

In the right panel, he stands up against a wall, his arms outstretched with palms pressed to the surface. Together the three drawings witness a progression, from withdrawn insecurity to tentative expansion. The gloomy gray of the first panel fades in the second and by the third has given way to a cool, clear white. Shadows of objects beyond the frame add to the mystery of the sequence, suggesting further entangling or liberating circumstances.

Breaker has tremendous command of the human figure, and the accuracy and detail in her representations seem neither gratuitous nor overly precious. The convincing portrayal of skin and muscle is enlivened by her skill at conveying the ineffable qualities of light and atmosphere.

In “Studio,” these qualities attain a magical dimension. A woman sits cross-legged in a heavy wooden chair, a large black book open on her lap. Her head tilts all the way back, as if a dream, a word, an image lifted itself off the page she was reading and wrapped itself around her imagination. She sits before a wall of windows in a spare, quiet setting, normal but for an amorphous golden cloud hovering beside her.