ART REVIEWS : Jenkins’ Work: Where the Yellow Went

An exhibition of drawings and sculpture by Michael Jenkins, on view at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica, shrieks with the forced, unnatural cheerfulness of a nursing home.

Jenkins’ favorite color is an intense yellow--a shade so shrill that it’s almost hostile--and this installation finds him splashing it around with an alarmingly free hand. He slathers it on the wooden shower that functions as the centerpiece of the show, uses it for punctuation in his drawings, and applies it as trim on other sculptures. It’s a shade of yellow you see a lot in elementary school, and it lends Jenkins’ work a false air of innocence.

This is a very weird show: The colors are Pop, the form is minimal and the content is funk. Jenkins’ work has a clean, clinical surface and emotionally it’s oddly muted, but it’s wildly strange at the same time. As with sculpture by Robert Gober and Charles Ray, Jenkins’ objects are forlorn and dumb in a mannered, self-conscious way--they seem awkward and ungainly, as though they don’t belong in an art gallery (or any place else, for that matter). Fashioning simple replicas of everyday things--lifeguard chairs, an outdoor shower, a tiny wooden trellis sprouting a growth of felt daisies--Jenkins favors flimsy materials (cardboard and felt) and kitsch motifs (he’s big on stripes, stars and dots). His work resonates with impermanence and artificiality, with the cheapness of props for a low-budget theatrical production.

With Jenkins’ drawings, we find fragile pencil sketches that float untethered on large sheets of white paper. The recurring image in his graphic work is a skeleton wearing various party hats; in putting goofy hats on an image symbolizing death, Jenkins seems to be mocking something. However, it’s hard to bring the humor in his work into focus--there’s something lurking and sneaky about Jenkins’ wit. Other drawings depict a lighthouse, a life preserver, a lifeguard tower and houses with broken windows. These various “clues” come together so as to suggest a plot line revolving around a seaside resort for the dead. Standing amid this work, one has the sense of being marooned or castaway--stuck at a macabre party. A gallery wall strung with cardboard letters reading “Happy Anniversary” (they’re painted bright yellow, of course) really underscores that feeling.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, to March 23, (213) 453-0180. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Alchemical Art: On view at the Pence Gallery in Santa Monica is a series of 100 drawings by British artist Keith Milow. Executed in oil on copper, aluminum or lead and mounted on plywood, the drawings (which all basically conform to a prototype and are stacked on the wall in double rows) give you the sense of traveling through some kind of alchemical realm when you view them in sequence.

Patterns and forms--drifting spheres, stars, undulating ribbons of gold, checkerboards, cryptic Roman numerals--appear, swell to a crescendo as one moves down the wall, then disappear. Milow artificially ages the surface of his drawings to give them a lustrous, burnished glow, and the resulting look is a rich, highly decorative variation on classicism. Like celestial charts, Milow’s drawings organize magic into a crisp, symmetrical system.

Also on view is a series of photographs titled “The Mirror” by New York artist Arne Svenson, who has developed a unique approach to portraiture rooted in silhouette. The facial features of his subjects are muted to the point that their heads and shoulders are nothing more than fleshy growths of skin. It’s a rather contrived and pointlessly gimmicky technique, and one tends to be distracted with trying to figure out how Svenson does it, rather than what he’s trying to do or why.

* Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to April 7, (213) 393-0069. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Positive Pain: “I want my work to be a wound that needs to be cleaned,” says hard-edge abstractionist Cary Smith, “and when I give it to you I want to give it to you very hard. People who like positive pain will like my work.”

Smith is right that his work is no easy viewing experience. The subject of an exhibition at the Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica (this is his first West Coast show), Smith turns out large, geometric grids executed in jarringly sour color schemes that resonate in the retina like Op art. Neo-Geo guy Peter Halley employed a similar strategy a few years back so this work doesn’t look terribly new, but it certainly does look intense.

Smith’s work has the excruciating exactitude and formal beauty of minimalism, but in fact, he looks to American folk art designs rather than reductive painting for inspiration. His reverence for tradition carries over into his technique too--Smith doesn’t like to do things the easy way. These paintings look as though they’d be a snap to make--all one would need would be a roll of masking tape and some buckets of paint--but in fact, Smith’s methodology is much more involved. He paints with a cold paste chiefly composed of wax, which he applies with a palette knife (without the aid of tape) over an underpainting of gray. All that labor imbues his work with palpable density and weight.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 942 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to March 30, (213) 451-1121. Closed Sundays and Mondays.