Santa Monica

John Coplans, the distinguished critic and former editor of Artforum magazine, was 60 when he took up photography in 1980. His large gelatin prints--the scale determined by his former work as an abstract painter--were initially of friends, then of portions of his own aging body. In Coplans’ bluntly honest, penetrating vision, middle-age anatomy becomes a newly discovered terrain--drooping, creased, furred and yet also heroically sculptural. Shakespeare’s line, “What a piece of work is man,” never seemed more apt than in these powerful close-up views.

In “A Show of Hand,” Coplans restricts his view to his two hands and still finds room for discoveries. In one photograph, his index and middle finger appear to “walk,” balancing the rest of his hand, which assumes the ungainly droop of an old man’s body. In another image, Coplans’ two straight middle fingers take on the grandiose verticality of great pillars and even call to mind Barnett Newman’s “zips.”

Two cupped hands enclose a double dose of darkness--a darkness that somehow suggests the mystery and finality of death. Even a view of Coplans’ palm with the fingers curled every which way becomes a meditation on the limits of anarchy and irregularity within the tightly organized system of the human body. (BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., to Sept. 9.)