ART REVIEWS : Starn Brothers’ ‘Blue Medusa’ Sails Into Town

Los Angeles gets its first good look at New York mega-photographers Doug and Mike Starn in a show of oversize works. Actually, the widely hailed twin-brother artists come across less as photographers than as conceptual object-makers. Calling them assemblagists wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Like classic bricoleur art, the emergent sensibility here is far more important than the stuff that makes it up. The largest and most engaging piece is “Blue Medusa.” Big as a small billboard, it uses the image of Theodore Gericault’s classic 19th-Century painting “The Raft of the Medusa” reproduced in cobalt on photo-transparent film and mounted on a steel frame held together with pipe clamps. The painting depicts survivors of a noted maritime disaster sighting their rescue ship after 12 days adrift. When the Medusa foundered off the coast of Africa in 1818, 149 men were set over the side on a raft. Before their ordeal was over, 134 had died of everything from hunger to cannibalism.

Gericault’s massive painting fueled a political scandal ignited by opponents of the restored Bourbon regime, becoming one of the rare works of art to have direct social impact. Gericault himself died at 32, joining the poignant ranks of unfulfilled genius.

The Starns’ version has a keen poetic edge that comes from cutting the photo in four sections that suggest a ship’s sails. Other works in the same room use variations on the pipe-strut format to display, among other things, a snarling sculpted griffin atop a sarcophagus, a pair of huge eyes, and front page from a 1928 New York Daily News reporting the execution of murderer Ruth Snyder, the first woman ever electrocuted in the United States.

In an adjoining gallery, all works are based on Old Master religious art shot in sections or torn up, reassembled and mounted on weathered wood. Rogier van der Weyden’s mournful “Deposition” is across from Mantegna’s “Calvary.” Nearby a mater dolorosa cries tears of cloudy plastic caulking.

There is almost nothing new about this work. Artists have done master variations since time immemorial. Photography has long since been hybridized with sculpture and other traditional forms. About all the Starns have contributed is large scale and interesting workmanship.

It’s really their sensibility that counts. Their fascination with sensation, notoriety, death, suffering and art mark them off as classic Neo-Romantics. Obviously there’s nothing new about Romanticism either. So why all the fuss?

It seems to be a case of a pendulum swinging. Art watchers have grown heartily sick of the manipulative cynicism, sarcasm and exhaustion of art made by those of the Jeff Koons persuasion. The Starns offer youthful idealism and fervid feeling. They believe in what they are doing. How far that heartfelt sincerity can carry their work is an open question. But it is a relief.

Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Nov. 17. New Gallery Debuts: A new Beverly Hills gallery launches itself promisingly with the work of Kenneth Noland, a former leader of the Minimalist stain-painting school. Noland, 66, came to apparently unshakable historical fame in the ‘60s associated with the only Washington school to gain ascendancy in living memory. When minimalism fell out of fashion, artists of Noland’s ilk drifted into a kind of watchful limbo. He hasn’t had a painting show in Los Angeles since 1980.

Older works included here remind us of what a good if somewhat chilly painter he was. The idea behind his simple geometric abstract work was to create effects of optical depth without recourse to traditional lines of perspective or “shading.” A set of concentric target circles from 1962 bounces nicely in and out of space. “Deep Valley” of 1966 is just four oblique stripes on a diamond format. The whole painting reads like a plane angled into the wall and the stripes do accordion-pleat tricks. Effects are agreeably subtle.

New work from the “Flare Series” are more sculptural, as if Noland has been thinking about Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. Separate works are made up of three to six tall, skinny remnant shapes. Each is a bright, if not glaring, single color, all framed individually and abutted. The best of them is “Minstrel” with its pulpy color scheme of neutrals, raspberry and grape. A nice sculptural rocking rhythm incorporates the empty bits between sections.

Since the surrounding critical rhetoric has died down, this art doesn’t seem as urgent as it once did. These days it’s either a conversation piece for cognoscenti or docile corporate art.

Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 456 N. Camden Drive, to Nov. 17.

Mesches’ Trashy Glamour: Veteran L.A. painter Arnold Mesches decamped for New York six years ago. He’s back with seven large paintings and a dozen collages. In “Target Practice,” we glimpse a bloody corpse by a swimming pool while an adagio tough lurks nearby. Looks like we’re in for Neo-Expressionism and social commentary a la Leon Golub. But no.

Mesches paints in an assured, illustrative Expressionist manner, setting most scenes in a desert oasis. One shows two Foreign Legion-style guards next to an empty yellow chair with a red robe on it. Looks like somebody just went for a swim. There she is in another picture reclining under an incongruous chandelier. Across the way, liveried footmen and a tiger await her for an elaborately laid meal. From the looks of the tiger, maybe she’s the main course.

Mesches is revealed as another Romantic, in love with B-movie fantasy and trashy glamour. The work shouldn’t be this naive or this cute but it is well-made and likable.

Robert Berman Gallery, 2044 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Nov. 10.

Copious Adams Show: Persistent Neo-Expressionism comes abstracted in a copious show of 40 works by Los Angeles painter Lisa Adams. She leans to clunky cartoon arabesques and tortured receding road squiggles alternating depressed browns with manic pinks and fuchsias. Her touch is sure in large passages but gets thin in linear moves.

Her best device is attaching hunks of decorative iron work to continue compositions off the edge of the canvas as in “Stand By.” Alas, she overuses the motif until it feels like shtick. The evidence of both number and appearance tag the work as more energetic than selective. Authentic talent is left feeling more overwrought than iron.

Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Nov. 10.

Reed’s Rings: Colorado sculptor Carl Reed works well but his brand of abstraction is as familiar to modernism as “The Rite of Spring.” His open rings recall Mike Todd enlivened with a bit of fetish craftsmanship. Touches of surrealism appear in “Prop Series No. 5,” where a weathered plank appears suspended atop a thin steel rod. Tony Delap did that around here in the ‘60s. There are nice understated patches, as when metal turns to wood in “Keystone,” but the horde of other artists the work brings to mind suggests there is little wiggle room left in the genre.

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Nov. 24.