ART / Cathy Curtis : Strombotne Is Still in Search of Checkmate With His Chess Pieces

A couple of years ago, Southern California painter James Strombotne wrote a letter to The Times decrying a lengthy Calendar article about Julian Schnabel, whom Strombotne called “yet another manufactured ‘genius’ from the Big Tower of Babel Apple.”

The rage that buzzed through his brief letter suggested more than just a reader’s pique at media attention focused on a young artist he dislikes. Strombotne, 54, has been on the art scene for more than 30 years but he is not nearly as celebrated as a number of his contemporaries--among them, Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha and John McCracken.

His relative obscurity may be due in part to the insecure position of figurative art during the past few decades. But the feistiness of Strombotne’s early work that impressed reviewers has also softened over the years into fey and facile illustration.

So maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising that his recent paintings and watercolors are showing (through Feb. 3) at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana, not a major venue in anyone’s book. The typically cartoonlike figures in his paintings and watercolors are all chess pieces (some with distinctly humanoid bodies) caught up in a curious--and for the most part, indecipherable--game of alliances.

The stronger paintings are the simpler ones, in which Strombotne allows the figures in his allegories room to breathe.

In “Calamities,” for example, an all-red chessboard holds a queen, profiled in chalky white, a barrel-chested king marching off the board at the bottom, a sleeping knight (the piece that looks like a horse), an incongruous little girl pulling a supine dog, and a variety of cheerful or dazed pawns, some of which zoom around in the air. At the far edge of the board stand the opposing king and queen; just beyond that, an Everyman in suspenders (presumably a player) flings up his arms.

Exactly what this all is supposed to signify is anyone’s guess. But the mood is sort of deadpan-zany: a pleasing, if harmless, blend of frolic and dismay.

In other paintings, like “Radiant Queen,” the artist embroiders a fanciful tapestry of curling white lines around a single chess piece, creating a dense, primitivist aura with the suggestion of a radioactive or electrical charge.

The weaker pieces tend to be too busy and crowded, and some of the watercolors incorporate tiresomely cute rip-offs of cartoon techniques (dotted lines signifying motion, multiple arms or faces on figures).

But the larger difficulty with all of this work is its slightness, its fragile and simplistic-seeming imagery and anecdotal approach. It may well be that the themes Strombotne has in mind are central and powerful human concerns; but in the translation of idea to paint, most of the guiding vision seems to have evaporated.

Also showing at OCCCA are satirical terra-cotta busts of male “types” by Bardene Allen and prints by Joan Popovich-Kutscher.

Allen’s figures wear their preoccupations on their persons: one guy has dollar signs on his eyeballs; another has credit card bills arrayed on his chest; a third sports Ray-Ban-style shades “reflecting” the images of buxom nude women. But this is the kind of easy-target, knee-jerk stuff that most artists get out of their systems during their school days.

The artist’s stronger suits are her relaxed, brightly expressionistic application of paint (similar to the look of Bay Area Figurative paintings of the 1950s) and her evocation of characteristic postures and expressions--particularly in a slack-jawed sleeping man and the hollow desperation in the flung-back head of a yuppie overachiever.

Popovich-Kutscher’s prints are peppered with recurrent images of unraveling ropes, tiny arrows and geometric forms, fragments of screens or fences and irregular scraps of paper that look somewhat like maps. The mysterious titles--”Power of Dark Sad,” “My Feeling of Lemon Life,” “I Couldn’t My Appearance”--sound as though they were invented by someone uncertain about the way the English language fits together.

One piece (“Little Girl of Me”) is more immediately revelatory of the forces shaping the artist’s point of view. The scraps of paper are portions of a social worker’s report: “Mother sorry child born and wishes for immediate termination of uncertainty about diagnosis and placement. . . . In spite of mother’s rejection of child who is different, child relates to people and has a sweet happy smile. . . .”

As a 3-year-old, Popovich-Kutscher was institutionalized in a home for retarded children. It took several years for doctors to realize that she was deaf, not mentally deficient. Seen in that light, the abstract prints may seem to echo the artist’s fears and confusions, and the frustrating barriers separating her from the rest of the world.

But for the viewer innocent of the salient facts of Popovich-Kutscher’s life, the work comes across as earnest and carefully executed but ultimately too blandly self-effacing to create much of an impression. Once again, there seems to be a gap between the enormous freight the artist has put on the ship she is sending out to sea and the slim pickings that reach the opposite shore, where the viewer stands.

Work by James Strombotne, Bardene Allen and Joan Popovich-Kutscher remains on view through Feb. 3 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Space 111, Santa Ana. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. , Wednesday through Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 549-4989.