ART REVIEWS : The Chaos and Beauty of Peter Drake’s Universe

Peter Drake’s work operates in the realm where memory, fantasy and dreams merge to create images charged with multiple meaning. Combining elements of 15th-Century Sienese painting, Surrealism, the Baroque and 19th-Century photography, his paintings, on view at the newly opened Shea & Bornstein Gallery in Santa Monica, are freighted with nuances of Freud and Jung. Drake’s visual vocabulary revolves around textbook psychotherapy metaphors--bridges, boats and ladders, flooded rooms, hooded and bound figures--but this young New York artist invests them with such rapturous beauty that one is willing to overlook the fact that the content of his work is occasionally a bit formulaic.

A visionary along the lines of Elihu Vedder and Henry Fuseli, Drake is a product of a grand European tradition that considers the skillful depiction of light as central to any great painting. Drake’s light is a viscous, hazy, golden one, a light that fails to illuminate things adequately and leaves one struggling to bring the world into clear focus. This heavy, honeyed light is largely achieved by the multiple players of high-gloss varnish that Drake slathers onto his paintings as a finishing touch. The resulting slick, thick surface imparts a quality of narcotized inertia--looking at Drake’s work one thinks of the feeling commonly experienced in dreams of needing to flee and being unable to move.

That quality of drugged-out panic is what identifies Drake’s work as a product of the 20th Century. Depicting isolated figures in situations of exile, abandonment and entrapment, his paintings are rooted in an Existential view of life. Fear, interpreted as an agent of destruction that challenges man at every turn, lurks as a dark subtext in almost every image.

Drake often juxtaposes his figures with visual metaphors for the power of nature (a flood, a grove of peculiar, menacing trees) that suggest that man is at the mercy of a mercurial, deadly force governed by a whimsical God. Drake’s psychological landscape is unpoliced by logic and is a treacherous place indeed, but there’s an unfettered sensuality to it as well. As depicted in these haunting paintings, the chaos of the universe and the human psyche shimmer with strange beauty. * Shea & Bornstein Gallery: 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica; to June 18; (213) 452-4210. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

All the Young Dudes: For his debut exhibition in Los Angeles, on view at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Hollywood, acclaimed New York advertising photographer Bruce Weber shows a recently completed film short, along with images from his latest book, “Bruce Weber.” The man who gave the world those racy Calvin Klein underwear ads, Weber has come up with a rather cryptic body of work here. Hung salon-style (stacked in bouquet-like clusters), the show combines celebrity portraits, landscapes, old family photos and pictures of dogs and babies. The largest chunk of wall space, however, is given over to images of beautiful young men in various states of undress.

Weber’s style of beefcake portraiture might be described as “Brideshead Revisited” meets Gold’s Gym. Unlike Robert Mapplethorpe’s male nudes, which are designed to be shocking and confrontational, Weber serves up a softened, aestheticized homoerotica. Perfumed with nostalgia for a romanticized, bygone era of privilege and ease, his pictures seem rooted in the past, while offering an up-to-the-minute look at the quintessential modern man. In Weber’s view, the ideal man is an outdoorsy, all-American guy cut from the same cloth as Gary Cooper or Sam Shepard (who Weber’s photographed extensively). He’s big on athletes, cowboys and handsome beach bums. Weber espouses an extremely narrow definition of beauty--it’s so exacting that it verges on the fascistic--and this is perhaps the most objectionable thing about his work.

Often photographed to appear passive and self-absorbed (an image of a seminude man caressing his own reflection in a mirror takes this to a comical extreme), with waxed bodies buffed to a high gloss, Weber’s men resemble marble statues from ancient Greece. The personalities of these young gods are curiously neutralized, and what we sense of them is their physicality. They’re like human Irish Setters--gorgeous, healthy animals with the smooth, untroubled brows of the blissfully empty-headed. Favoring classical poses and set-ups, Weber positions his hunks in a private realm of leisure and perfect weather, a world perpetually on holiday. Adrift in this imaginary endless summer, people move with an effortless elegance, their flawless good looks underscored by rustic surroundings.

Weber’s film short elaborates this theme further. Intercutting film of himself as a child with footage of nude men jumping on trampolines and romping with leaping dogs, the film is ostensibly an inquiry into Weber’s adolescent sexual awakening. A written text recounting Weber’s early sexual experiences is superimposed over the images, and occasionally text and image compliment each other effectively. At other points, however, you feel as if you’re looking at nothing more than soft-core gay pornography. These are the moments one becomes aware that cultural limits pertaining to permissible displays of sexuality are being challenged and that there may be something important embedded in these seemingly frivolous pictures.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery; 148 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood; to June 22; (213) 934-2250. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Sculptures and Paintings: On view at the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery in Santa Monica are four new sculptures by Heide Fasnacht and recent drawings and paintings by Jurgen Partenheimer. Fasnacht’s work--large, low to the ground pieces made of rubber and steel--are poised between the industrial and the organic, and as with work by L.A. artists Jacki Den Hartog and Ann Preston, the handshake it extends is cold, clammy and rather forbidding.

Partenheimer’s work, a synthesis of Minimalism and geometric abstraction, is steeped in theory and is self-reflexive in the extreme. When the artist builds his pieces solidly and refrains from drifting too far into the ether, his work exudes a delicate charm. When the pieces grow too rarefied--and they often do--they seem anemic and disengaged.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery: 1547 9th St., Santa Monica; to June 22; (213) 395-0222. Closed Sundays and Mondays.