ART REVIEWS : Form That Uses Movement as an Idea and Reality

There is a little to laugh about and a little to mourn in the sculptural objects at Space Gallery. Bella Feldman’s steel sculptures are very Zen plays with materials and form that use movement as an idea as well as a reality. Many of the pieces actually do move, or rather rock, while others use small insets of large and small steps to allude to climbing and progression. Most engaging is the tipsy, swinging steel hammock of rusty nails, “Kafka’s Couch.” With its inflection of self-induced pain in the midst of pleasure, it lends a level of literate intelligence to the work that most of her other pieces only strive to reach.

Scale trivializes many of Feldman’s ideas. Instead of physical ruminations on shifts of consciousness, which the titles hint at, the smaller works on tall tables look like pat illustrative formulas. The work only really takes off when the physical form adds insight, as it does in the reclining chair-of-steps, “House of the Poet.”

Small scale seems totally appropriate, however, to Gavin Lee’s palladium photograph and lead pieces in the next space. These pieces are intimate shrines to people and places that have died or are dying. In their use of close-up photographs of unknown individuals and electric votive lighting, many of the shrines suggest portable Christian Boltanskis. Yet by their scale, Lee’s memorials are to individuals rather than a larger, national holocaust. The regret Lee evokes is as sharp and unspecific as Boltanskis’ but more contained. However, only when it reaches out into the drying bed of the great Salt Lake, to stare at the drying bones of innumerable fish, does Lee’s grief struggle uncomfortably with its tiny confinement. The cold comfort of the lead boxes--which can honor an individual’s memory--do little but corral the remains of disaster. We wait for something more, perhaps a scientific explanation, to give meaning to so much death.

* Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 11; (213) 461-8166. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Rationality and Magic: If all the world’s a stage, as the Bard once proclaimed, then Rose-Lynn Fisher is designing sets for a cosmic, timeless drama. Her mixed-media, collage paintings on paper use Renaissance perspective to create an infinitely vast stage or chessboard peopled by fantasy characters part thespian, part fairy, bird or cowboy. Fisher’s surfaces are lush, her appropriated images fascinating. We feel the artist is updating some arcane, medieval scientific manuscript, using an alchemy of metallic paints to describe an enigmatic equation of rationality flirting with magic. It’s an absorbing mixture.

Dawn Arrowsmith’s paintings on wood have their own enigma. It’s a sensual veil of mystery that enshrouds her tantalizing references in systematic circles of interlocking nature, art and the female form. Arrowsmith’s wooden grounds are smooth, lush surfaces of rich, transparent color through which other portions of imagery seem to rise slowly to the surface. It’s clear from the perfectly sanded, drilled and carved surface that the artist is as interested in the physicality of her paintings as well as the allusions they explore. But Arrowsmith’s organic imagery never lets us forget the painting’s base is wood. Like a genetic memory, that fact emerges though gouges that become the veins in a leaf to unite with the slowly congealing visual innuendo of a woman’s legs or “limbs.” Sexy yet aloof, many of the paintings have the disorienting air of a game of connect-the-dots or an optical test for depth perception. It’s a level of gamesmanship tinged with scientific inquiry that suggests we are looking at a part of an image and trying to intuit a larger whole.

Tucked into the gallery’s tiny back viewing room are Luis Serrano’s latest pictures of the people and spaces that surround him. Serrano is a wonderful painter whose compositions, drawing and glazing techniques are all marvelously adept. Yet for all their skill, his still lifes and portraiture are content to convey simply a sense of something warmly familiar. Only his more complex images reach for something more--an amicable sense of mystery. In these paintings, Serrano allows his transparent medium to reframe the reality of his figures. As they fade tantalizingly into and out of home and family, they function both as memory and record, engaging us with the way they encapsulate the ephemeral nature of the artist’s mind.

* Daniel Saxon Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., to May 11.