ART REVIEW : The Odd Vision of a Man From Normal

The time has grown so cynical that we may have lost the ability to recognize guileless candor. Such a climate makes problems for an artist like 42-year-old Nicholas Africano. A native of Illinois, he works in the town of Normal, where an abandoned orphanage serves as his studio. His world is a timeless past made up of literary and artistic references where “The Golden Bough” can waft through Freud. He wants to live in Arcady but Chicago won’t let his mind alone.

Rarely seen hereabouts, his recent work is on view at the Lannan Foundation’s exquisitely serene galleries in an exhibition titled “Innocence and Experience.” It is a strange melange where humility meets opulence, the archaic encounters the Neo-Classical and the absurd faces down the sublime. The only L.A. artist it brings to mind is Charles Garabedian and, at that, the comparison is only fractionally illuminating.

Africano’s exhibition consists of 26 works, which is not even as large as it sounds because half are a series of monotypes and the rest body forth an aura of the frugal repast. Even a relatively huge painting like the 15-foot “Tea” depicts just two figures against a scrubby neutral background. A man stands stiffly offering tea to a woman. In style and appearance he resembles Picasso in his Iberian-influenced Rose period, circa 1906. She is huddled on the floor, collapsed on her knees, in a semi-fetal posture.

Excepting the appearance of a couple of monks and saints, virtually all the male figures depicted here could be him, all the women her. Through hints and nods the show suggests itself as an open-ended narrative about a pair of troubled, inexperienced lovers who rarely meet.

The ensemble reads as much as an installation as a series of separate works. The effect of mise en scene is heightened by an exhibition design that is--although tastefully restrained--intensely decorative. In the smaller rooms the foundation designates as the “Low Gallery,” walls and pedestals are colored a sonorous off-green and executed in a mottled texture of the type practiced by so-called “art painters.” In the larger “High Gallery,” everything is a rosy tan that occasionally blushes gold. Throughout Africano’s self-effacing paintings are encased in frames that suggest rococo garlands. Works are spaced widely with a care that is nearly precious.

How ever this combination came about, it creates a clash of expressive vectors that wobbles between the legitimately ambiguous and the suspiciously disingenuous. That is not necessarily Africano’s fault. What is he to do? These days it’s almost impossible for an actor to read a line like, “Life is but a delicate tragedy.” Half the audience thinks he is kidding and the rest are sure he is crazy.

At one glimpse a painting looks like Picasso at his most youthfully sentimental when a moment ago it whispered of Leon Golub’s weird series of torture pictures. Well, these are odd days. At least Africano never waxes coy like Francesco Clemente.

The male lead in Africano’s cast goes from assuring himself he’s a handsome dog in “Je Suis Beau” to feeling he’s a goner in, “Je Suis Perdu.” An insecure fellow, he is stoically ecstatic in “He Turned Round and Round” and guiltily conciliatory in “Tea.”

Daphnis and Chloe never had these kinds of problems.

The woman seems to be called Anna. In “Gnossienne” she is a proper young classical goddess with a bowl of fruit that stands outside the painting. In “Anna’s Mistake” she is a marble sculpture who has shattered her water jug. Same thing painted in “Anna’s Room.” Nobody since Jean-Baptiste Greuze has practiced this kind of sexual symbolism with a straight face.

Now that she has lost her virtue, Anna goes into her catatonic crouch, her hands beneath her. Whether she is caressing or guarding herself is impossible to say. Either way she is not happy. He is not happy.

Africano will not be everybody’s dish. In a way he makes himself vulnerable from all sides. That could be a sly solicitation for sympathy but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like the shy outpourings of a sensibility determined to express itself even though it knows it has no protective carapace.

The artist juggles a lot of balls. Some are made of lead, others of soapsuds. That’s not easy to do. His fans are liable to number those who value the offbeat--the paintings of the brothers Le Nain, the novelist Myron Brinig.

The Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave. , to May 18. Closed Mondays. (213) 506-1004.