ART REVIEW : Peter Shelton’s Eccentric Shapes at La Jolla

There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about a bulging belly sticking out from the wall right about your own belly-level, and something indescribably poignant about a pair of lopsided, carrot-like legs. When Peter Shelton is clicking, his sculptures--often made of semi-transparent wax over a visible metal armature--provoke all manner of inchoate feelings in the viewer.

Assembled in a show called “Waxworks” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (to June 4), a flock of these pieces from 1983-88 range in tone from spry and wondrous oddity to tight-lipped postmodernist severity.

The best pieces have a certain drollness that comes from borrowing elements from human anatomy (like shoulders, necks, stomachs), nature (gourds, roots, wings) and garments (shields, collars) and mixing them up in spare, irregularly shaped objects made from variously obdurate and fragile-looking materials. Adroit placement on the wall counts, too, as do Shelton’s punning titles.

A gourd-like form (“Peckerhead”) hung high on the wall sprouts a tall red member that sticks straight up like a handle. “Clearbelly,” the plump belly piece, and “Pins,” the dwindling legs, are also winners, as is “Littletrunk,” a white waxy piece with a long “trunk” and tiny stubs of legs--like a cross between a human figure and a tree branch.

When Shelton falters, the works seem overly manicured in a chic-gallery way. “Blackboat,” which looks rather like a giant half of a peanut shell with a polished black interior and a textured gray exterior, offers no fey conceit and seems too mutely elegant to pique the imagination.

“Blackwing,” too, is a handsome mixed-media piece swinging out from the wall in an elegant dark curve, but it doesn’t tease at the psyche in any of the sly ways Shelton has at his disposal. On the other hand, “Redwing,” with its aerodynamic shape and wood-grained veneer, suggests a curious conflation of the shapes of human shoulders and arms, maple tree seed pods (the kind kids stick on their noses) and an airplane propeller.

When he turns to cast metal, Shelton generally abandons the eccentric and puckish qualities of his mixed-media pieces. Suddenly the work becomes a Serious Art Object. “Ironfloater,” for example, is an irregularly contoured rusted iron container suspended from the ceiling. It seems to aspire to be a lorn piece of flotsam--once abandoned to the elements, now adrift in the air--but its presentation seems so rigidly formal that it cancels out allusive content.

“32th” is a group of 32 cast copper objects--they look somewhat like giant teeth--that hang (on small loops) from the undersides of a group of slender metal bars suspended from the ceiling. The perplexed viewer tries to find some Shelton-esque image or notion to hang onto here (besides the apropos silliness of the made-up word, thirty-tooth and perhaps a nod to the fragility of the human body), but the point remains elusive.

Yet “Redshoulder” retains something of the artists’ unexpected, fresh vision along with formal grace. The piece is simply a red rectangular solid pushed gently out of shape so that it grows “shoulders.” By such simple means Shelton offers a delicious tension between ever-so-slightly humorous anthropormorphism and sober purity of line. Those are the balancing acts he pulls off best.