La Cienega Area

Sculptor Jack Zajac’s bronzes are tangible forms standing for the intangible essence of life. His ram skulls, bound goats and falling water may differ widely in form but have in common a keen physical appreciation for mass as a container for the life force.

In the “Falling Water” series he has been working on since the ‘60s, that life force has a particularly abstract visage. It translates into sleek, elongated, narrow pillars of wavering line that mime an unbroken stream of pouring liquid. The fluid has no source, it simply materializes jaggedly in space, drops and flows solidly away. Along the way its twists and slight bulges make highly abstracted figurative references to delicately balanced nymphs. Dramatic and sensual they hover in the gallery as if held by a spell to the sharp geometry of the base.

Against the rough and massive form of the earlier cast skulls and the power of his dying goats these smooth, liquid bronzes are decidedly less forceful. They don’t dominate space like the huge fragments of bone or wring emotion out of the gyrations of the dead and dying. While they speak about the same subjects, the terms here seem more refined, and the language more idealized. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Nov. 11).