ART : Gallery Opens With New, Vintage Work of Billy Al Bengston
As a teen-ager growing up in Irvine, Mark Moore wished a pizza parlor would open in town. Well, times change and dreams mature. Now Orange County has plenty of pizza parlors, but a sophisticated art collector is hard put to find a commercial gallery to patronize.
Aware that 40% of the clients of his Long Beach gallery, the Works, were coming from Orange County, Moore decided to take the plunge. On Friday, the 2,500-square-foot Works Gallery South opened in Crystal Court, Costa Mesa, with a show of recent and vintage paintings by Billy Al Bengston.
The space, designed by Leonard Malmquist of Thompson and Associates, reeks of industrial chic, with cement floors, exposed ceiling beams and a fussily portentous contraption by Los Angeles artist Michael Davis at the entryway. But all in all, the look is a reasonable compromise between the severe design of top-notch contemporary galleries in Los Angeles and the glitz factor that seems to be de rigueur in a mall catering to the carriage trade.
Bengston, 55, was a savvy choice to launch the gallery. One of Los Angeles’ best-known painters, he had a retrospective exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall--one of the all-important signs of serious net worth in the art world. His work is also alluringly attractive--graced with glowing color and easy-on-the-eye patterns.
True, in terms of serious critical acclaim, his glory days are over. Bengston’s recent “moon” paintings look like fancy gift-wrap next to the amazing freshness and devil-may-care delight of his experiments of the early 1960s.
That’s when he hit upon incorporating the spray technique and metallic lacquer of custom auto body shops into his work. Applying layers of paint on sheets of Masonite and (slightly later) aluminum, he created high-gloss surfaces that were both brilliantly reflective and dreamily translucent, suggesting tantalizing, glowing depths. He has said that this work “took off from things I saw in the street: cars, signs . . . man-made things that we see in harsh California light.”
It was a decade in which the art world was much concerned with the meaning inherent in applying pure color to a surface. Most tantalizing was the idea that--instead of painting a subject on a canvas--paint and canvas could be rendered indivisible. Rather than being a “window” into a separate reality--the illusion painting has nurtured since the Renaissance--a painting could be simply about the retinal sensation of color.
In New York, such “color field” painters as Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland were emphasizing the pure sensory effect of color by letting paint flow onto the canvas, spraying it on or applying it in rigorous stripes that show no trace of the brush. Meanwhile, Pop Art was gathering speed with its a brash, in-your-face treatment of such unlofty subjects as comic book imagery, beer cans and movie idols.
In California, Bengston was one of several young artists--including Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman and Larry Bell--who simultaneously explored the effects of light on surfaces, using such space-age industrial materials as Plexiglas and cast acrylic resin. Bengston’s early “chevron” paintings, incorporating the machismo of military stripes on luscious layers of lacquered color, seemed to combine aspects of Pop as well as the new interest in color sensations.
The chevrons he painted on dented pieces of aluminum, which came to be known as the “dentos,” set up a fine tension between the physicality of the crumpled, battered metal and the atmospheric fields of color. The gallery has just two of these pieces, one a quietly lustrous golden tan; the other a delicious combination of purple, speckled yellow and a neutral drift of wordless graffiti.
In the early ‘70s, Bengston went back to working on canvas. The pieces featuring an iris motif taken from a sugar packet logo are known as the “Draculas” after a chance remark by another artist that the flower looked like Count Dracula turning into a bat. The show offers a more generous sampler of these, from a tiny square one in mauve, white and iridescent green to a version in which small, feathery orange and green splotches settle here and there like dandelion fluff.
The in-group slant of this “dracula” and “dento” business seems to be of a piece with the macho aura that surrounds Bengston--the guy whose universe is said to revolve around chicks, motorcycles, surfing and his good-time artist buddies. What was once just a youthful, if sexist-sounding, way of life has come to be a handy sales tool for collectors more interested in body culture than theories of art.
Eventually, the irises/draculas appeared in concert with washes of lush, high-key color and tropical imagery (palms, hibiscus, saw-toothed blue seas) suggested by the landscape of Hawaii, where Bengston set up a second studio.
Bengston turns his attention to the lunar matters in recent work, the centerpiece of this exhibition. In a series of small watercolors, he invokes the moon and the shadow it casts on the water as a stylized upside-down exclamation point against the blue-black darkness of sky and water. Spacious paintings offer fanciful multiple glimpses of the moon, encrusted with metallic paint against skies that appear to be wrapped with broad swaths of red or blue ribbon.
Although in other hands the image might serve as a meditation on the cosmos or the mutability of time, Bengston seizes it simply as another way to fill a canvas with luminous color and pleasing pattern. As relaxed and cheerful as happy hour on the lanai, Bengston’s work has lost all its bite. Still, the new stuff remains just the ticket for collectors who want Barcalounger art with a big name: a pleasant, relaxing experience that makes no demands on the gray matter.
