VISUAL ARTS / Leah Ollman : Pair of Sculptors Reach High and Low With Their Minimalist Approach

Ailent debate is raging between the sculptural works in a La Jolla gallery and those in a downtown space. One show attests to the rich possibilities of a minimal, formal vocabulary. The other argues self-consciously and self-defeatingly for the poverty of that same minimalist mode.

Robin Bright, a long-time San Diegan, has been working on his “Hector Vex” series since 1968. His latest work in the series, bronze wall reliefs and plaster and wood constructions, can be seen through Saturday at the Thomas Babeor Gallery (7470 Girard Ave., La Jolla). A play on the words of Vector Hex, the name of a computer language that Bright happened upon during a New York City stroll, the “Hector Vex” works derive from spare, yet elegant arrangements of line and mass.

The lines of the current work, rendered in wood or varying textures of bronze, read like notes toward a refined architecture. The slender horizontal and vertical rods in bronze constitute simple, geometric forms resembling the skeletal structures of high-rise buildings, their mid-level setbacks slimming their boxy contours. These tiny (11-inch-high) models of order, symmetry and balance evoke a conceptual ideal. They refer to the sleek sensibility of the present, a utopian perfection that has been manifested with varied success in the actual built environment.

In his wood and plaster constructions, Bright juxtaposes this sterile purity with an earlier, more humanistic sensibility, by merging clean, geometric lines with the weathered and worn surfaces of architectural ornamentation and ancient tools. In “Hector Vex No. 203,” for instance, the precise contours of a domed tower rise from the foundation of a building detail embellished with scrolls and patterned foliage. Bright coats the decorative plaster form with a pastel dust to create the illusion of an aged architectural fragment.

In “Hector Vex No. 201,” he transforms plaster into ancient stone, complete with pits, discoloration and irregular edges. The adze-like shape made of this faux ancient material supports a series of perfectly graduated lines forming a tall, narrow rectangle.

Although equally enjoyable for their pure calligraphic elegance, Bright’s works invite musings on the disparity between the present and the past, the industrial and the hand-tooled, the high-minded and the earthly. That the artist is capable of evoking such poetic images of modernity’s numbing beauty and the past’s humanistic warmth through such spare, minimal means is indeed impressive. Though modest and unassuming, Bright’s work affirms the potential of pure form to embody eloquent and provocative meaning.

The quiet depth of Bright’s work contrasts sharply with the exuberant superficiality of David Wilson’s, now at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (660 9th Ave., through Dec. 31).

Wilson, who received his MFA from UC San Diego a few years ago and now teaches art in Tennessee, goes to greater, more theatrical lengths with his sculptural work than does Bright, yet the results are far shallower and less rewarding. Wilson constructs wooden frameworks in varying geometric shapes and sizes, then covers them with fitted, brightly colored cloth. Most embody a spunky dialogue between the rigid and upright and the deflated and unformed.

A collapsed green and blue roof lays atop a green cube on the floor; a large pink “X” spanning one wall bears a droopy blue tail on the end of each arm; a standing white post sprouts three purple arms, each starting out erect then falling flaccidly toward the floor. Although Wilson’s work refers only obliquely to representational forms--a house, tree or person--its rumpled, comical look recalls the soft sculpture of pop artist Claes Oldenburg.

Just as Oldenburg’s large, upholstered versions of hamburgers and baseball bats poke holes in the seriousness and pretention of modern art, Wilson’s work deflates the egotistical aloofness of minimal sculpture. Wilson does this by approaching the minimalist’s simple vocabulary of geometric forms and machine-rendered surfaces (though Wilson’s fabric is hand-dyed, the forms are machine-sewn, thus the artist’s touch is all but absent) with a snappy sense of humor.

His work is good for a laugh or two, and the vibrancy of the fuschia, yellow and turquoise surfaces gives the senses a quick tingle. But for all it brightness, it grabs the attention only to waste it on a single wry joke, repeated and repeated. Wilson’s sculptures stand like windsocks in the still air--limp, mute and dormant. Their message is no message at all.