ART REVIEWS : The Powerful Plasticity of Alexander

Peter Alexander’s art has had many moods but somewhere in the equation it has always leaned to classical harmony. He first dented the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-’60s making cubes, wedges and slabs of colored-and-cast polyester resin--plastic to most of us. This work hasn’t been seen publicly for years so it’s likely to come as a surprise to people who know him best as a land and seascape artist.

He’s come up with a show of a couple of dozen of the plastics made from 1966 to 1972. One of the earliest is a cube with cottony clouds suspended inside, thus proving that landscape has always been on his mind even when it took abstract form.

The ensemble is more than stunning. It makes up an unwritten chapter in the history of L.A. art.

When Alexander launched this enterprise, the aesthetic emphasis was on the idea of artworks as objects. Billy Al Bengston made paintings that were finished like auto bodies, polished and lacquered. Larry Bell made glass boxes as exquisite as updated Faberge eggs, and Ken Price was convincing people that ceramic cups could be full-blown artworks. By the time the chapter ended, artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler had dematerialized art into works made of little more than pure projected light or powdery empty space. Alexander’s plastics make up an authentic synthesis of the two trends, using the objecthood of the Finish Fetish to trap the sometimes elusive effects of the Light and Space artists.

One striking slender vertical wedge begins as a foggy gray. The color becomes less dense as the material thins until the sculpture stops being an object and just, well, disappears. A fugue of five slightly convex yellow-to-brown slabs hangs on the wall. Somehow, the translucent material absorbs light and glows from within. The relief sculpture acts like a Minimalist color-stain painting. A black cube appears opaque from one angle, turns a brooding pink at another and opens portals of rectangular light as one moves around it.

There are those who say that L.A. art effectively vanished when the Light and Space artists moved it out into the environment. It is terrific art but you often have to make a pilgrimage to an extinct volcano to see it. Alexander encapsulated it into an accessible and elegant form.

Other artists who tried this were either wrestled to the mat by the leaden mass of the materials or seduced by its cosmetic charms. In Alexander’s version, you are barely aware the plastic is there. It’s as close as sculpture can get to pure effects of color and light.

* James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica; to March 16.

Grace Under Pressure: Serious painting is making a comeback, as witnessed by the American solo debut of British artist Therese Oulton. Large paintings and small monotypes often have a surface touch that rivals that of Jasper Johns. Her “Indiscretion No. 2” recalls his U.S. map paintings. She’s woollier but sometimes more inventive. That gets our attention and once captured it’s further rewarded. The work will pass for abstract but it’s layered with feeling and fitful flashes of imagery. “Lacuna” has two vertical stacks of elongated ovoid shapes that suggest both tropical fish and glass beads. They seem to be disintegrating, eroded by the atmosphere of the mottled background. The painting speaks of loss with discreet sadness. The problem could be anything from nostalgia for childhood to a keep-smiling mournfulness over the state of the environment.

The work has an interestingly enigmatic blend of rational understructure and romantic surface movement that makes it stand apart. “Bedrock” has the heroic strata of a geological diagram and the cozy charm of a print bedspread. Engagingly well-mannered, the work seems to beabout grace under pressure, something the English have a talent for.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., Venice.; to March 9.

Looping the Loops: Bernar Venet is an internationally noted sculptor who divides his time between New York and his native France. He shows up here with three oversized sculptures and large drawings based on them. Basically, all are just big coiled loops of rusty metal. They remind one of giant versions of those Fourth of July “snakes” that loop around crazily when touched by a match.

The work is collectively titled “Indeterminate Lines” and looks pretty primitive. Contemplated, it looks pretty sophisticated. Venet makes the pristine logic of circles turn eccentric. The clunkiness of bent metal becomes witty when he ends loops with a clever downward punctuation. He knows how to pull the white background walls of the gallery forward optically, tuck them between the segments, then shove them back again with an angled strut.

He knows his stuff and does it well but the work carries the subtle bother of a lot of otherwise very good international art. It doesn’t seem to come from anywhere and it doesn’t seem to get anywhere. It wanders the globe from show to show existing in some neoprimitive nomadic nowhere, related to nothing but itself and other members of the wandering tribe.

* Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; to March 16.