O.C. ART : Bram Van Velde Offers Charm in Abundance : A Costa Mesa gallery is showing late-career lithographs by an obscure Dutch artist.

Suppose you wanted to open a high-toned art gallery in the bland hotel-and-corporate sprawl across the street from South Coast Plaza. Your immediate audience would probably be people used to buying European luxury goods and signing for hefty dinner checks. Might they spring for prints by an unknown Dutchman? Sounds like a gamble.

Still, Sata Fine Art--a Costa Mesa gallery that opened six months ago with a stodgy exhibit of lithographs by Helen Frankenthaler and other blue-chip types--is showing late-career lithographs by Bram van Velde, a rather obscure Dutch artist who died in 1981 at 86.

Most of these fluid abstractions are composed of layers of vivid, thinly applied color, selectively lightened with a milky white wash. A few are all-black, enlivened by eccentric twists and turns of the brush. Broad strokes of ink often are separated into thin tracks, as if they had been combed onto the lithographic stone from which the print was pulled.

Gallery director Carl F. Berg says the exhibit is in keeping with his plans to show mostly abstract, expressionistic work by a mixture of well-known artists, significant figures who are nonetheless not household names, and emerging artists.

Van Velde, mostly self-taught, initially apprenticed with a house paint company whose owner happened to be an art collector. Descrying a talent in the making, he sent van Velde to Munich to get a cultural education. A few years later, the young artist moved to Paris, where he spent most of his life.

The hunted-looking figures in his early landscape paintings share some of the Nordic Angst of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. But beginning in the late ‘30s, van Velde began partitioning his paintings into increasingly tight compartments that eventually took on an abstract life of their own.

If that has a familiar sound, it’s because the paintings of van Velde’s older countryman, Piet Mondrian, evolved in a somewhat similar way. Elements in Mondrian’s Expressionist landscapes gradually began to stiffen into geometrical markings, in keeping with his goal of developing a completely non-objective art.

Van Velde’s change of heart was quite different, however, prompted by the tensions and privations surrounding World War II rather than by a private theory. He is said to have viewed painting as an Existential act, an effort to “deal with what was not doable,” as he once told an interviewer.

Van Velde’s fervent supporter during the ‘30s and ‘40s was playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who declared in an essay that van Velde was “the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and to shrink from it desertion.” As if thinking of one of his own immobilized characters, the author of “Waiting for Godot” wrote that van Velde “makes an expressive art . . . of impossibility.”

Today, it’s hard to see how such luminous, lyrical work could be freighted with so much heavyweight philosophizing. In practical terms, van Velde’s art seems to have been the result of a rather small-scale and delicate struggle: Would he allow his brush to travel freely wherever it wanted to go, or would he impel it to divide and conquer the canvas into a series of neatly ordered territories? In an essay for the summer, 1990, issue of Artforum magazine, Daniel Soutif suggests that Beckett was really using his remarks about the artist “to understand himself.”

Soutif goes on to note that in the ‘50s in America, van Velde was considered just another member of the postwar School of Paris, whose pallid achievements were being blown out of the water by the urgency and power of the Abstract Expressionists. Soutif says that cloud has lifted now. “We now associate Van Velde’s mature works with those of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock,” he writes, citing two of the most prominent Abstract Expressionists.

But that, too, is a curious statement. No one would ever mistake van Velde’s late work for that of an American; it is too lyrical and decorative, too small scale and mannered. Pollock’s massive sweep and high-powered attack are nowhere to be found in this work; nor is Gorky’s sense of constantly percolating formal invention.

Although one sprightly, vaguely Surrealistic black-and-white print in the show dates from 1939, most of the works are from the 1960s and ‘70s. Van Velde didn’t begin to make lithographs in a concentrated way until 1967, according to the first of two awkwardly written essays--apparently translated from the original French--in the exhibition catalogue.

Florian Rodari writes in the essays that van Velde became a lithographer “at the insistence of friends and publishers who wanted to facilitate access to his relatively small (500 canvases) body of work”--a remark that makes the venture sound more like a marketing ploy than a personal desire to explore a different medium.

The artist himself is quoted in a quirky defense of his turn to printmaking: “A painting is too rare a thing to have an impact. . . . For me, a painting is a grand moment in the course of a long moment during which nothing grand happens. . . . With lithography you can make a hundred grand moments. That is a considerable help because grand moments are rare.”

So how many “grand moments” are there in this show? None at all, really. Van Velde isn’t that kind of artist. Instead, he offers charm in abundance, and a bouquet of color.

“Bram van Velde: Lithographs” is on view through Aug. 18 at Sata Fine Arts, 655 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Friday, 10 a.m to 6 p.m. Saturday. Information: (714) 556-3646.