Santa Monica

Last May Patrick Hogan died at age 41 of Werding-Hoffman syndrome, a rare neuromuscular affliction that kept him confined to a wheelchair for his entire career. A thoroughly game guy, he never exploited his handicap and asked nothing better than to be judged purely on the merits of his art. A memorial exhibition proves that the work more than stands on its own.

It surveys his output in 56 paintings and works on paper executed between 1970 and 1986. Inevitably, Hogan’s physical condition reflected in the work. There is a quality of enigmatic agony in shapes that range from nervous thick blobs of waxy rhoplex to abstract forms that look like misshapen hourglasses rendered in straight lines. There is transcendence in the way Hogan transformed these troubled shapes into powerful talismanic entities as if he were an Indian shaman making colored earth into magical sand paintings.

The most striking thing about the exhibition is the way it clarifies Hogan’s venture. It is clear as never before that he was heavily involved with materials which he arranged and metamorphosed ritualistically like a tribal artist.

He used rhoplex as a symbolic substance the way Joseph Beuys used lard, allowing its beeswax-like translucency to speak of renewal and fecundity. Many of the untitled works are made of rope arranged in nesting coils and then splattered with paint. In one, the main shape has the dynamism of a sharp stab of pain seen as a kind of abstract votive figure. Its pointillist technique resembles Indian beading. In another the coils take on the quality of a braided rug. There is nothing lugubrious about it, but it makes you think of a person whose enforced posture caused him to stare at the floor and who took comfort in the rug his mother had made for the hearth.

One of his very last works evokes the metaphysical complexities of an Indian mandala. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to Feb. 4.)