Work of Artist Nagel Provides Divided Focus

Sheer exuberance has little credibility in today’s art world, that cynical sphere whose watchword could be “Don’t be happy, worry.” The unabashed glee of an artist like David Hockney tickles the general public’s fancy, but it deprives the more carnivorous art audience of the gristle it loves to gnaw. From skepticism to nihilism, the mood of the hottest contemporary art is serious, often to a fault.

Andres Nagel, whose work is on view through April 20 at the Tasende Gallery in La Jolla (820 Prospect St.), occupies a curious niche in this daunting scenario. His style is nothing if not playful, enthusiastic, vivacious. In the show’s catalogue, gallery owner Jose Tasende traces the source of this figurative freedom to a new political openness that dawned during the artist’s formative years in his native Basque country.

But Nagel’s vision is not all helium and confetti. A kind of violence or violation--of the body, the spirit or the urban landscape--intrudes upon the celebration just often enough to persuade that Nagel’s work is capable of a certain conceptual depth and weight. These radical shifts between a critical, philosophical stance and a tone of light frivolity end up plaguing the Tasende show with an air of restless indecision.

“Kicks,” a wall relief depicting an oversized shoe sending a tin can flying, epitomizes Nagel’s lighter side. A three-dimensional Pop cartoon, the oil on polyester and fiberglass sculpture, glorifies a simple scrap of a moment. Nagel plays handily with his materials, fracturing the flat, painted planes to create an explosive effect, and mixing aggressive, gestural brushwork with collaged metal sheets to ally real and represented forms. In this, as in other wall reliefs in the show, Nagel displays an athletic command over form and color, but provides no psychological ballast to the works’ impressive physical presence.

One of the smallest, most modest works in the show, “Smoking Box,” has the most enduring presence of all. This is no circus of flying forms; this is the quiet crime that takes place behind the scenes. Two plumes of solid smoke (formed of fiberglass) creep upward out of a wooden crate, cushioned with straw. A worn fabric belt stretches across their split, a token gesture of restraint. The decisive blow comes from an ax, which has forced a clean crack in one of the plumes. Its bearer is invisible, absent, an anonymous power squelching a nascent energy. Enigmatic and haunting, “Smoking Box” whispers of dangers unforeseen.

Nagel’s works on paper speak more plainly about clashing values. Here, etched images of monumental public sculptures--Roman emperors, Christian martyrs--are overrun with intense color and agitated line and subtly undermined by collaged elements from the modern world, from condom packages to detergent labels. Within the carefully constructed chaos that Nagel has created, residue of the cheap and artificial rubs up against symbols of the true and eternal. Which better reflects our values--the intruding but practical clutter of contemporary urban life or the idealized figures of history and myth?

The spirited cacophonies of color and texture that frame Nagel’s questions often overwhelm them, so that a pulsing visual energy becomes the means and end of many of the works. Whether a vibrant portrait of two horn players blowing solid sound out of their silver-leafed instruments or a massive rendition of a couple’s melodramatic kiss, these tableaux ensnare the senses while the mind roams about, starved and neglected.

Others, like “Smoking Box” and “My Husband Fulfills Me”--a low relief punctured by a thick spike--linger uncomfortably long in the mind, their violence having abraded one’s sense of sanctity. The jarring contrast between Nagel’s benign and playful imagery, like candy straight from the artist’s hand, and these shadowy threats gives the show a debilitating schizophrenia. The artist’s intentions blur and the work, with few exceptions, fails to bring them into focus.