ART REVIEWS : Fischl’s Growth Defined in Wight Exhibit

Over the years Eric Fischl’s paintings have gone from being single glimpses of depraved lifestyles into more fluid, multipanel paintings which build to ambiguous but distressing scenarios. This shift to a composite reality is due to the influence of his drawings on transparent glassine.

But, as is clear from this UCLA exhibit of 58 prints from 1986, it was in his serial monotypes that Fischl really developed fluidity of image. These series gathered under the title “Scenes and Sequences” allow him to alter the story repeatedly leaving behind a cumulative paper trail for the viewer.

Fischl’s images include figures, a touch of landscape, a hint of scene. But the artist zeroes in on the narrative power of the figure, on the way groups relate. He stirs things up so nothing can be taken for granted. Figures are based on old master art, historic photographs and snapshots he took at a clothing-optional Riviera beach. Expressive and bold in their chiaroscuro darks and lights they form an ambiguous world. Image to image males become female, whites becomes black, age happens before your eyes, animals become people and personal power drops in and out like a prodigal son.

That kind of instability is possible because the artist exploits the serial possibilities of the monoprint. Ghosts of an original drawing reappear overlapped by new imagery or altered by new drawing and their own washed-out pallor. One series entitled “Backyard” begins with two women. Both are naked. The older one sits looking with affection at the younger woman who stands holding her swimsuit like a dirty rag in one hand while a dog in the foreground chews relentlessly on his posterior.

Over the next two prints the older woman ages and fades away. The young Venus ages as well and the dog seems to give birth to a shadowy male figure who crouches behind. In the last two prints, only the crouching man remains but he is accompanied by a naked woman crawling around on all fours. Their relationship is detached voyeurism at first but remarkably becomes sexually intimate in the last image though little seems to change but the brushwork.

Like first impressions, these are quick images, made rapidly with thin washes of paint and smears of a dry brush. Their spontaneity calls for a quick read and seems perfectly suited to a book where one image leads rapidly and inevitably to the next. Not as muscular as his painting, nor as deeply disturbing, they are nonetheless still impressive for the spirit of the drawing, and the way the narrative remains as fluid as the medium. (Frederic S. Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, through Sunday.)

Show With a Social Conscience: Big, brash and pointedly bilateral, the paintings of Karen Carson overflow with exuberance and just a touch of social conscience. That moral stance is unexpected in such bubbly paintings as the ticking ecological tribute to Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring.” Here, wooden frame molding, energetic paint and a garish clock keeping accurate time all whirl in chaos around a dark book-shaped plexiglass form, almost completely obliterating a small strip of verdant garden.

But there is little of the scold or the gloomy prophet about any of these paintings. One after another they explode into radiant sunbursts of color, determined to be passionately upbeat. Pieces of molding stroked by jittery paint or emblazoned with shards of mirror fracture the surface into a glittering dynamism. Mimicking the duality of the brain and owing as much to Modernism’s love of the found object as barrio graffiti, the paintings appropriate beauty in all its guises--from decals of butterflies to junk jewelry or the flames painted on hot-rods.

Indeed Carson’s appreciation for gang insignias gives her series of small black-and-red morality tales a haunting edge. Looking for all the world like designs worked up by a tattoo artist for a motorcycle gang, these “Dangerous Drawings” herald such unsavory topics as “Hate,” “Greed,” “Cancer” and “Drunk” with skulls, guns, flaming hearts and radiant arachnids. Distasteful in subject, threatening by association yet still powerful, each insignia is an intelligent lesson in attraction and repulsion. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to May 19.)

Issues’ in 3-D: James Trivers’ newest 3-D paintings are getting better at fooling with the tricky comic book dimensionality that marks his oeuvre , but the ideas this time around get bogged down in heavy-handed, montage illustration. Granted, “Issues Without Answers,” like AIDS and the narcissism behind plastic surgery, aren’t easy to corral on one painting, but instead of a hard look we get headlines. Only occasionally, as in “Either or,” do the fragmented pieces of information make something of the painting’s struggle for depth and space to generate any kind of insight. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to May 26.)