ART REVIEWS : Cautionary Tale in Comic Book Form

For more than three decades, Roy Lichtenstein has been playing Henry Higgins to the lowly comic book. Employing enlarged Benday dot patterning and Mondrian colors to execute ironic turns on everything from action painting to the current censorship controversy, he combines the brute energy of pop culture with a droll, intellectual bemusment evocative of vintage Tom Wolfe. It’s a recipe that’s worn remarkably well over the years, and since the early ‘60s when the Pop-Art boom catapulted him to the front ranks of the avant-garde, he’s never looked out of date.

Currently one of the stars of the Museum of Modern Art’s hotly debated exhibition examining the ways high and low culture feed off each other, Lichtenstein is looking particularly au courant these days, and his series of snappy new paintings at BlumHelman in Santa Monica is one of the most engaging gallery shows to turn up hereabouts in a while. The second body of work in a series titled “Reflections on Cartoons,” the show features five paintings that read as a cautionary essay on the frightening things happening in America. We see guns and the talons of an eagle, a nude portrait of “Jessica Helms” (the X-rated parts of her anatomy discreetly covered, of course), and a clumsy, overfed dinosaur thudding to the ground.

Sharing the gallery is work by another elder statesmen of Modernism, Ellsworth Kelly. A hard-edge color painter who was among the first to use shaped canvases, Kelly looks like quite the classicist these days. Two works on view involving large geometric shapes rendered in flat, intensely saturated colors reiterate values central to much art of the ‘60s and ‘70s--specifically, the significance of form, process and surface. Made of composite material with enamel paint, they seem faintly nostalgic.

BlumHelman, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Dec. 1.

Roman Grandeur: The ideological atheism of much Post-Modern art hasn’t left anybody feeling particularly good (other than the handful of people who’ve gotten rich from it, of course), and art in search of mystical revelation continues to thrive. It seems to flourish with particular vigor in Italy, a country rooted in a profound reverence for history and an unabashedly sentimental view of the grandeur of the human soul. That more or less sums up the work of Domenico Bianchi on view at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice.

Bianchi lives in Rome and his work is perfumed with the spirit of that city--you sense it in his masterful grasp of the fresco form, as well as in the rich blend of histories that come to bear on his work. He tips his hat to the Arte Povera movement, for instance, in his use of lowly materials, and the influence of American Abstract Expressionist exile Cy Twombly (who’s lived in Rome for more than three decades) can also be detected in Bianchi’s work. At Louver, Bianchi shows 12 paintings made of wax and pigment on fiberglass panels. Layering rather than painting his surfaces, Bianchi “engraves” the wax with a vocabulary of enigmatic symbols--pulsating orbs of light, loopy biomorphic forms, floral motifs. The panels are then hung together so as to form a massive mural that hums with the portentous power of an oracle.

Also on view is a series of pastel drawings by David Nash, a British sculptor whose central theme is the relationship between nature and culture. Man, of course, feels justified to leave his thumbprint on everything that drifts his way, but Nash expresses this drive with considerable restraint. Effecting subtle transformations of what already exists in nature, Nash, like Brancusi, attempts to “free” the sculptural forms intrinsic to the organic world.

Fascinated with the ways wood cracks, decays, burns and bends, Nash works primarily with trees (this is a bit odd considering that he works in a converted church in an almost treeless slate quarrying area of Northern Wales). He restricts himself to dying or dead trees, and the vocabulary of shapes he wrenches from them include pine cones, spoons, boats and wishbones. Low-tech and austere, Nash’s work is essentially a primitive form of Minimalism.

This series of pastel studies for monumental works (many in the process of being completed) is surprisingly twee considering the massive scale Nash favors. Several of the drawings have the whimsical charm of a New Yorker magazine cover, and visual puns abound. We see, for instance, a row of trees coaxed with the aid of strategic grafting into growing in the form of a ladder. Exactly what Nash intends to communicate with this sort of topiary trick is anybody’s guess.

L.A. Louver, 55 N. Venice Blvd., and 77 Market St., Venice , to Nov. 24 .

Cryptic Messages: In a show of new work by John Mandel at the Krygier/Landau Gallery in Santa Monica, the L.A. artist creates a shrine to a lost language called Xiriguana. Without a bit of explanation from gallery personnel, however, one would be hard pressed to deduce this from these cryptic paintings. An odd series of clues (an anvil, a dog, books, a dead fish) rendered in a neat, classical hand, the paintings are freighted with a sense of loss and melancholy, but are mostly highly ambiguous. Perhaps it’s fitting that paintings about a lost language should leave one hungering for an explanatory text, but one comes away frustrated and curious to know the significance of the symbols that turn up in this homage to a body of knowledge devoured by time.

Also on view is “Take Over,” an elaborate conceptual goof on the commodification of art and the changing relationship between artists and dealers. Curated by Manuela Gandini and Loredana Parmesani, this installation originated in Milan, travels to New York from L.A., and evolves with each new location. The ghost of Jeff Koons hangs heavy over the show, which investigates the career of an archetypal corporation called Oklahoma Ltd. (the installation is basically comprised of various bits of bogus documentation). It seems like much ado about very little. That the art world is having some problems with money is hardly late-breaking news.

Krygier/Landau, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Nov. 24.