Rheims Shades Androgyny With ‘Modern Lovers’ Prints

If some salacious senatorial prude runs into Bettina Rheims’ exhibition, he’ll surely take her for a female Robert Mapplethorpe. He’ll be wrong as usual but it doesn’t matter since she’s French and outside his jurisdiction.

Her show of about 30 oversize black-and-white prints is called “Modern Lovers.” Each image is a portrait of some elfin Isabelle Huppert or a dawning, nude Gerard Depardieu with long blond locks. All have that particular kind of seal-suave beauty we associate with the French, where men are still mecs and the women toujours femme . The trouble is that here you can’t always tell the difference. The pouty gamin turns out a boy. The smoldering Latin lover type is very macho until you notice his cleavage.

The show is about androgyny in all its shadings. Like all such exercises it has its illicit voyeuristic kick but it’s really not particularly kinky. The sort of S&M; that smothers Mapplethorpe is only suggested here when a girl wears a transparent plastic vest or a topless fishnet underthing. They have such a never-never land kind of beauty it seems rather natural.

What is not quite natural is their aura of Baudelaire’s maudite chere enfant gatee --the cursed and tainted child. How did they come to have nothing to cover themselves with but a fictive membrane of fantasy, fleeting attraction and imperious glances that barely cover their vulnerability?

Suddenly we recognize them as the Parisian version of Hollywood Boulevard’s lost waifs. They are from the updated world of Godard’s “Breathless” and Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” A sexy show shifts focus to a sociological complaint on great cities that foster refinement and then let it rot like dead urchins strewn on the shore.

Nick Taggart’s work is also on view. His very small black-and-white paintings look like drawings and depict such juxtapositions as Stonehenge next to a lightning storm. A galaxy of ovoid forms bear such titles as “Nebula” and “Corona.” You certainly can’t accuse this transplanted Briton of showing off. He seems to have undertaken the path of one who investigates universal questions only to find them shrinking to microscopic autism.

* Fahey/Kline Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave.; to May 11.

MINIMALLY A BAD BOY: New York Minimalist bad boy Robert Morris comes to town with “The I-Beam Suite.” It consists of just four 13-foot-each sculptures. That comes out to two triangles, a square and a circle fashioned of the steel members used to make massive buildings. They lean brooding against walls.

It is not easy to sort individual sensibilities among Minimalist artists who tend to be emotionally similar. Morris’ version has a slight edge of metaphysical kink. That’s also available in leather and head shops everywhere. What Morris brings to it is an aura of raw power and authoritarianism. There has been quite a lot of that loose in the society in recent years. Anyone who has had enough of it is free to find this work a little tiresome.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave.; to June 9.

COLLAGE COLLISION: Roy Dowell’s painted collages appear to be about a head-on collision between revolutionary Old-World Modernist art and the zingy pop culture of the States. There is also more than a little overlay concerning the symbolism of signs, some of it quite funny.

One of the 30-odd untitled works pastes in a pair of billboard green olives with pimentos. Dowell draws a pair of tassels on the red parts and they become a classic burlesque strippers’ breasts. He brings politics to Cubism by adding a logotype of a red-and-yellow hammer and sickle that includes the fractional word, “Democra-.” Rumination on glasnost .

Dowell is so busy making his work look chaotic and hip that it takes a while to notice how good he is at extending the underlying elegance of pioneers like Picasso and Braque, as in a stingingly suave composition of red and green or some small collages where the pieces click in like a well-made jigsaw puzzle.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd.; to May 26.