ART REVIEWS : Ron Rizk’s Painterly Deceptions

Traditional trompe l’oeil painting extends back to the 16th Century when, legend has it, Giotto so cleverly painted a fly on the nose of a figure that his teacher Cimabue tried repeatedly to brush it aside before realizing the deception.

That history is repeatedly evoked in Ron Rizk’s painterly still life deceptions of shallow, well-worn boxes housing old tools and scraps of picture portrait postcards or old paintings. Frequently the torn “paper” portraits are images of men with remarkably long noses. Part court fool, part Pinocchio, they seem to act as subtle reminders that, despite the reality of what is rendered, the painting is a lie. For an art that works so hard at being taken for real, Rizk’s paintings are still somewhat straightforward about their capacity to deceive. There are numerous painted references to tools of the trade, drilling into surfaces, and surface illusion that make up a sub-text of artistic discussion completely at home in the postmodern theatrics of questioning the reality of the image.

Coupled with this analysis of the realism of the painted image is a subtle melancholy. Rizk’s incredibly detailed paintings of split wooden gears, old straight razors and shoe sizers all exude a kind of nostalgia. While this could reflect simply a disenchantment with results of the Industrial Revolution, within Rizk’s art dialogue it reads more as a longing for something authentic in a world where simulation is the general condition of the culture.

Ovsey Gallery, 126 N. La Brea, to March 30.

At the Border: Susanna Dodd’s subtly shaded graphite pencil drawings of horizontal strips of landscape also seem concerned with the reality of the image, or at least its proverbial “weight.” She sandwiches well-rendered black and white landscapes between two wide bands of horizontal white border that compress the drawing, unaccountably protecting it from the real physical heft of the narrow lead frame. Relatively narrow bands of silver leaf at the bottom of the drawing or along the horizon line read like gratuitous embellishment.

Susan Scott’s large, flat paintings of children playing games or interacting are interesting for the way they reveal the covert pain behind childhood. A game of blindman’s bluff becomes a dangerous play with fire, an examination of a loose tooth has connotations of impending sexual abuse, and a partly clothed girl on a couch appears tormented by a young boy. But Scott’s approach to these themes is spotty and occasionally, as in paintings like “Two Fighters,” gives too much away in her quest to convey the dynamics involved.

Gronk’s 50 pen and ink drawings on the other hand delight in playing it close to the vest. This collection of small framed images on a wall covered with the artist’s painted stylized logos of bull horns, heads, and “framed” pictures reads as a wall of trophies. Each drawing is something of a Mark Kostabi one-liner or idiosyncratic externalization of the artist’s internal dialogue. They are fun, irreverent, rigorously linear and frequently cuttingly honest as they try to make sense of society and personal relationships.

Daniel Saxon Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to March 30.