Unconventional Building Helps Bring Life to the Level of Art

Preconceptions aren’t usually the healthiest things to bring to an art exhibition, since they tend to encumber fresh responses. But it’s hard to avoid them when looking at the current show at the Brown Field Gallery. The setting of the show sparks so many questions about the nature of art and the impact of its context that the viewing experience is loaded--provocatively so--even before you enter the space.

The building once served as the kitchen for Navy personnel in training at Brown Field, an airport constructed near the border with Mexico during World War II. Artists have since adopted the dilapidated space for use as a studio and for sporadic exhibitions.

The punning relationship between the building’s original function as a galley, serving food for the body, and its current one as a gallery, offering nourishment for the mind and spirit, helps set the stage for the dynamic dialogue between the site and the art that takes place within.

If the pristine white walls of conventional galleries attest to the high-mindedness of the efforts within, the peeling, corroded, pocked and crumbling walls here suggest other motivations--an urgency to communicate directly, without the mediation of formal, art-world dictates and especially, a desire to bring life to the level of art and art to the heart of life.

All three artists in the show, “Natural Affinities,” address the relationship between man and the natural environment. Paintings by John Moros, a San Diego artist, reflect not only on the external world but also on the nature of art-making itself.

Moros encourages viewers of his “Skyboy” series to take the small paintings off the walls, to handle them and investigate them more closely. He rewards the curious viewer who heeds his advice with nuggets of wisdom and inspiration painted or applied to the back of the panels.

Although the fronts of the paintings are fairly consistent--a small, luminist cloudscape within an abstract, geometric border--the backs contain a range of insights.

Among the most telling are quotes by the painter Ad Reinhardt (“Art is Art; Everything Else is Everything Else”) and Pop artist Jasper Johns. Johns’ recipe for art applies especially well in this unpretentious setting, for it demystifies the art-making process: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”

Moros’ paintings pass on to the viewer fundamental questions, like those raised by Marcel Duchamp, about what constitutes art and what its purpose might be. In his images of skies, he proposes the traditional answer, that painting is a window to the world. But he simultaneously denies that function in the blistered, striped and layered paint bordering the skies. The expressive potentials of both representational and abstract painting are suggested here, and contrasted in a thoroughly engaging manner.

Installations by San Diegan Larry Dumlao and John O’Brien, who works in Los Angeles and San Diego, are far less effective. Dumlao’s “Reflecting Rocks and Trees” conjures up broad notions of ritual offering and sacrifice, as well as a worshipful regard for the natural world, but to no persuasive end.

A low, wooden table crowded with small carvings inspired by Oceanic sorcery figures is paired with two piles of rocks, a photo-mural of light pouring through trees, and dully reflective metal plates mounted on the walls. It’s an opaque work with little emotional power.

O’Brien’s two installations evoke a sense of loss over the Earth’s neglected beauty and power. “Imagined Site: Part I (Desert(ed) Visions)” and Part II do also suggest the spiritual significance of the natural world, but like Dumlao’s, O’Brien’s work feels diffused and unresolved.

Ironically, Moros’ paintings--the work that assumes the most conventional of formats--has the most impact in this unconventional show.

The show continues through March 16 at 1365 Lycoming St. Call 421-6454 for directions and hours.

The power of the calligraphic mark--as language, form and physical gesture--is explored in “Revelations of the Spirit, the current two-person show at the Linda Moore Gallery (1611 W. Lewis St., through Mar. 10).

A selection of prints by Antoni Tapies, one of Spain’s best-known living artists, bears a range of personal hieroglyphics that approach a universal, timeless character.

His print, “Figura,” has an earthy rawness akin to cave painting, and another has the feel of an ancient map. Its dense black continental masses float over a mottled, grayish sea. Choppy white lines connect the territories, an arrow points the way and a cross marks a destination. Much of Tapies’ work evokes journeys, though few do so this candidly.

In other prints, indecipherable jottings and trails impressed upon the malleable page leave the impression of flashes of insight--a pun chanced upon, a philosophy’s essence exposed. In “Cercle,” one of the most intellectually enduring works on view, Tapies hovers a smoky circle over a blunt black horizontal line. The line is marked with an A on one end and a B on the other. The ethereal ring and the logical line stand as emblems of opposite, guiding philosophies--the spiritual, unified, Orientally infused, against the practical, goal-oriented, Western.

Of his viewer Tapies has said: “I want to provoke him, to arouse his solidarity and altruism and to help him develop the potential we all have within us but which is stifled by industrial society.”

In this small show, as in more than 40 years of his urbane yet primal art, Tapies exposes a freedom and energy that do, indeed, inspire a quiet revolt against the predictable and overdefined.

Toko Shinoda, a “living national treasure” in Japan, who also first gained international attention in the 1950s, makes an interesting partner for Tapies in this show.

Their work differs dramatically in form. Her prints, with overpainting, are grace and refinement, where his are grit and power.

But, in spirit, both artists hunger for the essence of experience. Shinoda’s art comes closest to that elusive goal in her smaller works, with their delicate, reedlike lines dancing in space among thicker bands of ink. These remain powerful even without knowledge of their literary references, although much of the rest of the work feels thin and generically decorative.