ART REVIEWS : Byron: Disguise, Desire and Deception

More than a half-century ago, Joan Miro inaugurated a kind of pictorial field that was eventually to become so pervasive as to constitute a Ground Zero for whole squadrons of artists.

This flowing, aqueous, atmospheric space, achieved through the loose application of thinned pigment, was more than hospitable to the sorts of dreamy, just-below-conscious visions of the Surrealist enterprise. Michael Byron, the New York-based artist whose 11 paintings on wood panel and 22 on paper are at Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, recalls that Miro-esque space, especially as it has been resuscitated and reformed for the present generation by the German painter Sigmar Polke.

The often colorful surfaces of his larger than body-size panels are mottled, worked over, splashed, sprayed and washed (some look like they’ve had an acid bath). Visually, they read as lush decorative planes and, contradictorily, as indeterminate pools of floating space. In keeping with their closer ancestry in Polke than in Miro, they don’t seem crystalline, open or pure. Instead, they look like they’ve been through a lot.

The polluted spatial soup of Byron’s paintings is thus appropriate to the appearance of odd, equivocal visions. Collectively, this body of work is titled “There’s Probably Drugs Involved,” a wry way of nominally explaining such intoxicated images as a lacy, 18th-Century gentleman, duelist’s sword at his delicate waist, floating in a cloud of blue while perusing a fetishistic tribal carving atop a pedestal (a whisper of erotic violence emerges from the two figures’ shadow-play).

Byron also makes more direct connections to his suspicious title, with paintings such as “Portrait of a Poppy” and “Medellin.” In this narcotic-specific company, allusive pictures like “Commerce and the Plague,” “The Judge’s Son,” “The Witness” and “Of Course We Know Where Our Daughter Is” assume a more topically pointed edge.

Infected with cynicism and suspicion, these paintings posit a crisis of belief. “83 people claim they saw it “ declares the scrawl of ball-point ink across one of his drawings, in a tabloid-style assertion of the sighting of a hidden truth. “We really thought he was a woman” says another, seduced by the transformative power of artifice. “He said I could make a lot of $ quick” insists a third--a claim that, these days, might apply most definitively to either a crack dealer or an artist whose career clicks.

In fact, Byron’s ostensible tale of drug-induced hallucination, and of risk, crime and retribution, tells a different story of addiction. Swimming in beautiful but contaminated fields of paint, his narratives of disguise, dreamy desire and deception bespeak a deeply mysterious, finally inexplicable cultural addiction to painting itself.

Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, 1330 Fourth St., Santa Monica, through Oct. 13.

Body Politic: Jeanne Dunning’s first solo show in Los Angeles (she is based in Chicago) includes several provocative works. One of a sizable number of conceptual artists who work with photographs--here, glossy Cibachrome images, typically affixed to plexiglass--Dunning explores the ways in which the medium makes a fetish of the things it pictures, including the human body.

To understand why it’s a fecund subject, consider what a fetish is: an inanimate, usually man-made object believed to have magical power, either from a will of its own or from a god that has transformed the object into an instrument of its desires. Sure sounds like a photograph to me.

Together, the Cibachrome and plexiglass yield a hard, slick, cold surface for these images, which contributes to their documentary and diagnostic thrust. They feel clinical. And the strongest are diabolical pictures that just get creepier the longer you look at them.

For example, a rear view of a cascade of waist-length blond hair tops a bizarrely stunted torso. The hair is soft and appealing, yet decidedly repulsive too. Close perusal slowly reveals that the hair actually has been combed forward, over the sitter’s head and face; you see her from the front, not the back, which causes a misperception of bodily distortion.

Elsewhere, a portrait of a young woman with a bulbously swelling cheek wavers between an image of medical or criminal evidence and of purely artistic deception: The lump is likely formed by something secreted in her mouth. And several very uncomfortable pictures appear to show human or animal testicles--when they are, wildly enough, simply peeled and stewed tomatoes.

Despite the initial, repeated “misdiagnosis” of what we see, Dunning never covers up a plausibly benign explanation for the queasy image. And even though their evidence is phony or in doubt, neither do they lose their creepy edge. At a period in our image-saturated culture when spiritual, moral and legal issues of the body are the focus of intense political struggle, Dunning’s photographs assume a special resonance.

Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th Street, Santa Monica, through Oct. 13.

Seeing the Light: Someday, a significant museum in some corner of the universe will mount a fully considered retrospective of the art of the late, great John McLaughlin. Or maybe a major publisher will issue a thorough monograph or catalogue raisonne of his exceptional output. When they do, peace and harmony will not necessarily reign in the land, but one of this country’s great postwar modern artists--and this region’s very first one--will step out from the shadows of cult-dom.

In the meantime, we can stare longingly at occasional gallery shows. The seven pristine paintings at Daniel Weinberg Gallery--so pristine as to make one wonder if they’ve been locked in a vault or simply restored--span most of the self-taught painter’s mature career (the earliest dates from 1955; the latest, 1972). The geometric abstractions’ typical palette of gray, yellow, taupe, black and white seems increasingly eccentric, while the artist’s habit of bisecting the canvas--a compositional faux pas in ordinary hands--remains a dazzling maneuver that makes the split seem absolutely right.

It’s axiomatic that nature knows no straight lines. Still, McLaughlin puts rectilinear geometry at the service of organic nature, conjuring light, atmosphere, expansive horizons, flux and encompassing wholeness. Without his precedent, it’s hard to imagine the arrival of the subsequent aesthetic of Light-and-Space.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, through Sept. 29.

Tailor-Made Works: Twenty-five years ago, Minimalism removed bodily metaphors from sculpture. Now, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm makes Minimalism itself into sculpture’s body. He does it by neatly wrapping simple sculptural forms in men’s clothing--a pair of pants slipped over a tube, a shirt wrapped around a box, an overcoat folded inside a tall vitrine. The device is clever, but finally too thin to evoke more than rudimentary intimations of disappearance and loss.

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1634 17th St., Santa Monica, through Sept. 29.