ART REVIEW : William Wegman Goes Back to the Future

William Wegman’s 21 recent photographs at Linda Cathcart Gallery, which date from the past 15 months, show the artist working at top form. The pictures range from the decidedly fashion-conscious--the artist’s Weimaraner, Fay Ray, eloquently modeling haute-couture finery for the camera--to the high-mindedly formal, in doggy portraits whose chiarascuro effects are exquisitely arrayed. A few even manage to straddle these two poles, with Fay decked out as if in preparation for photographic enshrinement in some official hall of fame.

At James Corcoran Gallery, meanwhile, Wegman shows seven recent paintings and 10 works on paper. Childlike renderings on gentle fields of washed color, the New Yorker’s paintings have only been seen here once before, in a small 1988 show at Thomas Solomon’s Garage. This larger display is welcome, if only because it helps to bring into focus the artist’s otherwise seemingly disconcerting decision a few years back to begin painting at all.

When Wegman began to make videotapes and photographs 20 years ago, his work emerged from the larger suspicion of the day that painting, as a medium, was moribund, gelled in an aspic of pompous rhetoric. Wegman’s simple tapes and snapshots, underscored by boy-and-his-dog subject matter and sight-gag wit, emphasized a “homemade” quality that effectively knocked art off its lofty pedestal.

That unpretentious, homemade element is evident in Wegman’s doodle-like drawing style, both in the works on paper and in the new paintings. What’s curious about the latter is the washy fields of mottled color on which the images, many adapted from elementary school textbooks, are arrayed. These colorfully stained fields are executed in the very style of abstract painting Wegman successfully sought to undermine from the start. A poignantly lyrical quality emerges from the strongest of them, “Evolutionary Aquarium” and “Social Studies,” and the titles tell you why.

Through April 21 at Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., and James Corcoran Gallery, 1325 5th St., both in Santa Monica.