ART REVIEW : Artist Loses Zest in Careful Exploration of New Style

Artists’ personal journeys may sometimes involve visits to the sunny vacation spots of a career--praise from colleagues, good reviews, museum shows. Other trips are to the dank and dispiriting places where things just don’t work out. And sometimes artists are busy shuttling from one style to another before settling down or packing their bags again.

Clark Walding’s most recent paintings, on view through March 3 at Saddleback College Art Gallery, look like work-in-transit, exploring a new style but in a bland, careful way that expresses very little.

Four years ago, Walding’s “Heartland” series showed him to be a sturdy Neo-Expressionist painter, wielding a loose, broad brush on expansive canvases. Although his figures were weak--generalized in ways perilously close to commercial art--his landscapes were lush and juicy. In his best canvases, he went a step further, juxtaposing slices of different landscapes (or, occasionally, interior views) as if jump-cutting between different states of mind.

Since then, he has produced another painting series, “Show of Hands,” which sounds somewhat gimmicky--big images of the artist’s hand are superimposed over landscape views--but which may have been more impressive in person. (I haven’t seen the series.) In any case, the figure was beating a quick retreat in Walding’s work.

The new works continue the drift away from the figure in an even more decisive way. In fact, they don’t seem to have much to do with landscape, either. That is not necessarily a bad thing. But in redirecting his approach, Walding is turning his back on his chief strength. The works that make up “Crossing the Void” are fussy decorative objects first, paintings second and that is their downfall.

“Promise,” for example, consists of an assembly of vertical elements--a wooden slat wrapped with crinkled lead spritzed with metallic paint; a canvas brushed with three large, vaguely calligraphic motifs; another meandering abstract canvas garnished with more lead--all mounted on a wooden structure stuffed with barbed wire.

There is too much going on here, and also not enough. Some sense of an Asian sensibility comes through--via the “calligraphy” and the folding-screen allusion made by the separate components--but it just doesn’t add up to a unified vision. Great pains appear to have been taken to create a medley of textures and colors and shapes, but it doesn’t have anything intelligent to say for itself.

Most of Walding’s recent pieces incorporate lead, a material that has appealed to a number of European artists in recent years because of its basic, elemental nature and its cold, “anti-art” qualities of heaviness and dullness. In contrast, Walding’s use of lead seems trivial.

The lower portion of his painting, “Handmade Promise,” is cut neatly away to accommodate a rectangular lead bar. The painting, in brushy ocher, blue and gray, is of a generalized landscape containing a large form with an arched top (a ceremonial marker?). The lead piece may have been meant to carry a symbolic meaning of some kind, but it has no magical powers at all. It’s just a well-mannered hunk of metal sitting in a nicely crafted wooden holder. As in the other works on view, there is too much bland tastefulness here and not enough vision or guts or risk.

A hint of Walding’s lyrical earlier style remains in “Hidden Among the Leaves”--a passage that runs down the right-hand side of the painting. A white shade has risen to half-mast in a window, revealing a shimmering, indecipherable image, as if firecrackers are exploding inside. Below, a series of gradually widening horizontal stripes (wood siding on a house?) is interrupted by a painterly brown plank like a diving board viewed from above (maybe a piece of lumber leaning against the wall?).

Wouldn’t you know it. This fragment--with its combination of recognizable everyday forms and its slight whiff of mystery--contains more imaginative zest than Walding musters in all the other works put together. It looks like time to get back on the boat and sojourn for a while in some other port of call--or maybe even consider a voyage back home.

“Crossing the Void,” works by Clark Walding, remains on view at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway in Mission Viejo, through March 3. Gallery hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 582-4924.