ART REVIEWS : Lonely Scenes of Isolation From Bechtle

Bay Area photorealist Robert Bechtle explores the loneliness of the modern American city in a series of charcoal drawings on view at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica.

Taking us into a world of wide, empty streets devoid of human activity and shrouded in the heavy shadows of late afternoon, Bechtle’s work is largely based on photographs of San Francisco, but this is hardly the cheerful, cosmopolitan tourist haven of cable cars and sourdough bread. Rather, Bechtle’s city is a place of isolation, silence, empty parked cars and unoccupied houses. There are rarely any people in these drawings, and when they do appear, they’re usually depicted alone and looking rather forlorn. One comes away from this work thinking of the excruciatingly alienated writings of German author Peter Handke.

Like much art of the Bay Area Figuration School (which clearly influenced this artist), Bechtle’s work is infused with a melancholy lyricism and is rather conservative. Of course, photorealism is hardly on the cutting edge of the avant-garde, and the style looks a bit dated today--it’s an extremely rigid technique that doesn’t allow much room for growth or change. Nonetheless, of the many “isms” that have come and gone since the late ‘60s when this style first appeared, photorealism is aging relatively well, and it’s an effective vehicle for the sentiments Bechtle seeks to express.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery , 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica , to May 4 , (213) 453-0180. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Nature Boy: British artist David Nash is a fervent environmentalist with one foot planted in the realm of the mystical. Those two concerns dovetail neatly in five monumental sculptures on view at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice. Crudely chiseled out of fallen or condemned trees, Nash’s massive, roughly hewn homages to the primitive strike a perfect balance between the human world of ideas and nature’s vocabulary of organic forms. A work titled “Folds,” for instance, looks vaguely like a pair of canoes, but it also looks like huge chunks of rotting debris one might stumble across on the floor of an ancient forest. There’s a tremendous sense of weight to these pieces, and a feeling of ageless, geologic time--Nash’s work is big in every sense of the word.

“As a student I realized that the aesthetic I had was very small and the aesthetic in nature was enormous,” Nash explains in a catalogue essay, “so I try to work with the forms in nature.” Nash’s reverence for nature is evident in how subtly and sparingly he alters his found materials. He not only refrains from repairing the cracks and flaws in the wood he uses, but makes those characteristics focal points of the pieces. Tweaking his tree chunks ever so slightly, Nash shares authorship of these pieces with nature itself.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, to May 18, (213) 822-7529. Closed Sundays and Mondays.