O.C. ART REVIEW : Laguna’s Exhibit Illuminates Work by Alvin Light : A survey attempts to isolate him to Abstract Expressionism, but his sculptures suggest an affinity to mainstream precedents in modern art, principally the open form.

The Alvin Light exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum is not a major exhibition, but a welcome one. Light is a curious figure in the history of Bay Area painting and sculpture, and after his death in 1980 from lupus at the age of 48, his art largely disappeared from public view. Not that the artist was ever a frequent exhibitor, or even very prolific. During his lifetime he showed his work only eight times in solo exhibitions--all in San Francisco, save for one 1963 show in Los Angeles.

The present retrospective, which was organized by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, brings together 16 sculptures and eight works on paper spanning 23 years. As its title might imply, “The Expressive Sculpture of Alvin Light” means to isolate the artist’s work within the specific, developing context of Abstract Expressionist art in the Bay Area. The limitation is a curious one, for two reasons.

First, Light was of a much younger generation. He was barely 20 when he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1951, the very moment when the indisputable prominence of abstraction in the region was about to be challenged by a new style of figurative painting. When Light returned to the school in 1955, after a hiatus for military service, even such formerly committed abstract painters as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff had followed the adventurous lead of David Park and had turned to a figurative mode.

Second, Light was in the process of leaving painting behind in the mid-1950s in favor of the three dimensions of sculpture. In those early years, he shared a studio with the sculptor Manuel Neri, whose attraction to classical forms of figurative sculpture has long been pronounced. And not until 1962, years after Abstract Expressionism had become a hoary tradition, with countless watered-down tributaries, would Light find his own stride as an artist.

Surely, there are relationships to be found between Light’s sculpture and the 1950s paintings of such older artists as Frank Lobdell and Jack Jefferson. But the point is not that Abstract Expressionist principles had no meaning for Light’s art, merely that his development was plainly more complex than finding a way to “translate” a painterly mode into a sculptural one, as this show suggests. The slim catalogue takes a profoundly sentimental view, based on a conviction that Abstract Expressionism was the last truly “noble” modernist art. Alvin Light is cast in the role of heir.

The fit is an uncomfortable one, if only because Light--however immensely gifted he certainly was--was also decidedly provincial in sensibility. The curator of the show, Marc D’Estout, and the catalogue essayist, Charles Shere, respond in kind: Neither sees any need to discuss developments in art beyond the internal history of San Francisco. However, one look at Light’s sculpture in the exhibition suggests a decided affinity--even if only garnered secondhand--to mainstream sculptural precedents in modern art.

The principal precedent was hardly obscure: open-form sculpture, conceived of slender masses of metal joined to create a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space. Open-form sculpture had been pioneered by Picasso, modified in the 1930s by Julio Gonzalez and elaborated into a contemporary idiom by David Smith. Having transformed Cubist syntax from something solid and dense into lighter, airier possibilities, it easily ranked as the most prominent form of avant-garde sculpture in the United States during the 1950s.

The primary technical difference in Light’s brand of open-form sculpture was its choice of material. In lieu of iron or steel, Light used hardwood. In place of the oxyacetylene torch to join the linear elements, he used pegs, glue and laminates. Instead of an industrial poetry, he sought an organic one.

Light used roots, branches and weathered driftwood in his sculpture, and he often employed milled, chopped, sawed and carved lumber too. These elements are pieced together into larger, almost improvisational sculptures that, when successful, ambiguously evoke a mix of natural and architectonic forms. Spiral and helical shapes suggest processes of organic growth, and scale is significant. Bodily scale keeps the larger sculptures from feeling toylike and benignly decorative--traits that hamper the small, pedestal-bound pieces.

Surprisingly, color is important to Light’s sculpture. No doubt a legacy from his early training as a painter, color is not broadly or dramatically applied. Usually, it is secreted in the joints, or appears sparingly on an inner plane as an unexpected patch of paint. Its function seems to be to quietly draw the eye away from the larger form or surface, and into the sculpture’s complex interior network. Assembled parts are thus given equal weight to the whole.

Light’s most engaging works--such as “Spring 1974” and an untitled sculpture completed just before his death--are eccentric constructions that join natural and carved elements to erect precarious, frontal, upward-reaching forms. As if signaling mutely to the viewer, “Spring 1974” holds aloft a wood lintel, while the untitled sculpture raises a flaglike plane. Without being figurative, both exude a poignant, vaguely anthropomorphic feel. They couldn’t be more different from Abstract Expressionist art.

“The Expressive Sculpture of Alvin Light” continues through March 24 at Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Open daily, except Mondays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $1 to $2. Information: (714) 494-6531.