ART REVIEWS : Brice Bridges Past, Present in ‘Notations’

Back when he taught at UCLA, William Brice once tried to help a student who was having trouble. He couldn’t quite bring off an illustration in the witty manner of Marcel Vertes. Brice, held in awe for his bravura Neo-Mannerist drawing, was no more successful in emulating Vertes’ style than the student.

“You know what our problem is?” Brice asked.

“What?” asked the awed junior.

“We’re just not French,” he pronounced, striding off in dignified defeat.

Since then, the respected Los Angeles artist has evolved into a modern classicist, ever mindful of the legacy of Matisse and Picasso but always his own man.

In 1982, he carried around file cards, pencils and crayons so he could draw whenever moved by his muse. Now he’s installed 48 of the works at the County Museum of Art under the title “Notations.”

They open a portal on his ruminations. He worked small but thought large, as anyone familiar with his paintings might have guessed. At first glance, the ensemble seems to promise Picasso in one of his sillier moods, scribbling away at the bullfights or drawing a delicious nude as casually as he flicked an ash from his Gauloise.

As it turns out, Brice is no more capable of Iberian foolishness than he was of Gallic glitz. He just must be serious. Oh, an occasional work has a slight zingy flavor, but it’s like Pop art done by a Talmudic scholar.

What we really find here is a modern man contemplating things ancient and elemental. There is much of metamorphosis. A broken figure introduces a weighty sculptural element that moves from Henry Moore to Cycladic Greek and then becomes the altar of the prophets. Apollo’s sun turns into the rose of medieval romance before it assumes its guise as a woman’s sex.

The artist installed the series and we can detect its thematic unfolding. All of it is bathed in L.A. light, but that light is shared by the Mediterranean and by the ancient Near East. Hieroglyph scribble here and there. Compositions take on ceremonial gravity, so that in the end they are about romance sacrificed on the altar of culture. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., to May 27.)

Ecological Minimalism: If we put together two sets of otherwise unrelated exhibitions in beach-town galleries, there are things to be learned about why art works well or doesn’t. Richard Long is a Briton of the international set who has looked better and better with time. A species of ecological minimalist, he’s gotten down to a predictable repertoire that is consistently moving despite familiarity.

Here we have his big circle of river rock, target-circles painted on walls and scrubbed or imprinted with the artist’s painted hand. There is also a surprisingly touching suite of handmade papers that use mud from a dozen mighty rivers from the Amazon to the Indragiri. They evoke both planetary scale and intimate poetry. The artist seems as fond of them as of a favorite cat.

Simplicity notwithstanding, this art brings to bear the monolithic power of Stonehenge, the elegance of ancient Chinese court painting and the mystery of Indian mandalas. Modernity notwithstanding, it communicates in the traditional sensual language of art, with color, shape and texture moving us viscerally to empathy. (Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, to April 30.)

In the Mind’s Eye: New Yorker Christopher Wool’s big spare paintings seem to make common cause with Long, but the resemblance ends there. In one room, he shows six oversize white canvases with the word run or dog stenciled in black. In another gallery, a similar canvas is emblazoned wallpaper-style with a repeated pattern of a heraldic black bird. There is so little to see that visitors find themselves asking the proprietor if some building renovations under way are part of the art. They aren’t.

Wool’s art belongs to an order of experience opposite that of Long’s. If you happen to run around with a head full of texts on semiotics, you might happily while away hours puzzling over the meaning of it all. It appeals more to the mind than the eye and is that much thinner for it. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, to April 21.)

A Real Vegetarian: Manny Farber is an offbeat painter who, after a career as a film critic, took to picturing bird’s-eye views of desk-top clutter, toys and other intimate, commonplace items. Now he’s gone vegetarian. He depicts the woollier sorts of legumes, either along with flowers in Van Gogh-style still lifes or scattered about on blocky formats.

Work grows considerably brushier and more relaxed, so he is able to bring off a Post-Impressionist still-life like “Ranunculus” with easy authority. It all looks like straight painting but it is full of quiet quirks and private jokes. Vegetables done on checkered chunks of black and white live in a world half lacking in gravity. You can’t quite tell which plants are on solid ground and which are floating. Occasionally, we imagine a head of lettuce has taken on legs and is walking toward us.

None of it seems forced or self-conscious. It’s like meeting a perfectly earthy regular guy who can, incidentally, recite the encyclopedia and sing whole operas in falsetto. Very likable. (Krygier/Landau, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, to April 21.)

Name-Dropping: Ian Falconer also makes quirky paintings. They look like the spawn of some thrift-shop Raoul Dufy or Cecil Beaton wishing they were Matisse. Rendered in prissy, sarcastic colors, the brushwork is an awkward camp of the School of Paris at its most mewling. There is all manner of precious little jokes, like the chintzy Regency living room with an African mask above the hearth or the Matisse fishbowl beside a bust of Verdi.

Falconer does so much visual name-dropping it takes a while to realize the real butt of his jokes is his teacher, David Hockney. Maybe it’s not intentional. Maybe the satire is but the curdled result of a half-formed artist trying too hard to emulate an admired master. What a pity to waste so much effort to arrive at an art that feels inauthentic and spiteful. Falconer’s real sense of style deserves better use. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., to April 21.)