ART REVIEWS : Wilder Deflates Artistic Myths With Wit, Junk

Chris Wilder may have started out thumping playfully on the sides of the overripe “Painting is dead” argument, but his new work at Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica pointedly goes beyond painting. This time around, his trashy materials--a bright green, fake fur coat, fuzzy toilet seat cover daisy “pictures” and pillars of stacked lamp shades--help the artist poke hard at the inflated myth of the artist.

With a wild assortment of junk-turned-art-objects and a series of flocked images on aluminum or canvas, Wilder casts the artist as a modern day Robinson Crusoe--civilized survivor of contemporary isolation. The artist here is all ingenuity and wit, making art stuff out of other stuff but more to fight off boredom than survive.

Most of the pieces in Wilder’s play of “material satire” are conceptual one-liners that get momentum from the aesthetic shock value of their kitsch materials. But the flocked “Marooned” enamel prints on aluminum with their elaborate explanatory texts are more layered and therefore more engaging.

These images combine appropriated woodcut images of castaways with enlargements of ticks, fleas, dung beetles and cicada to raise issues, in this context, of the artist as outcast, parasite, scavenger and plague.

It’s an interesting strategy: Determinately anti-romantic, it humorously strips artists of their vestments of ennobled spirituality. Yet it also self mocks, toying with making memorial flames from oversized candles stuck in jugs and flocked X-ray paintings that suggest collectable shrouds of Turin.

Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 451-1121; to Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Latino Visions: Portraits of artists have a long tradition that brings with it validation and recognition of the sitter’s prominence as well as respected social value as a historical document. Within the Los Angeles art scene, where there is no shortage of portraits of famous artists with all their incumbent meaning, photographer and former Mexico City art critic Alejandro Rosas has determined that Latino artists are overdue being recognized for their contributions to the local culture.

His “Latino Artists of Los Angeles” black-and-white photographs at Santa Monica College Photography Gallery intends to fill this gap with portraits of 30 local Latino visual artists who show actively in the Los Angeles art scene. Many are well known, others less so, but the accumulated weight and gravity of their efforts is strongly felt in Rosas’ images.

Even though his approach to photographing an artist with their work is, for the most part, straightforward studio-bound documentation, the images are deftly composed and beautifully balanced structures of darks and light. Many of the images have a fierce earnestness about them that seems to owe as much to the determined dignity of the subject artist as to Rosas’ formal approach to portraiture.

This gives a haughty sense of style to portraits of Robert Gil de Montes and Harry Gamboa that borders on Madison Avenue slickness. But where Rosas relaxes a bit, as in the playful integration of art history and reality in Alfredo De Batuc’s halo-bound image or Barbara Carrasco’s art with magnification glass, which recalls painting’s historic fascination with the optics of perception, the photographs hit a powerful, impressively art-smart stride.

Santa Monica College Photography Gallery, Library, 17th and Pearl , (213) 450-5150; to July 9. Closed Saturdays, Sundays.

A New Medium: In the ‘80s Ron Davis, whose liquid fiberglass paintings of the ‘60s countered the three-dimensional illusion of perspective with the plastic flatness of surface, had a difficult time pumping new life into his plays with painterly space and artificial color.

A recent move to New Mexico seems to have knocked all the illusionism out of Davis, and he’s going for the real space of sculpture, leaving painting altogether. It’s a move with more life, even if it only teeters on being resolved.

These new pieces at Blum Helman gallery in Santa Monica are all peeled, jointed raw wood and bright color. The centerpiece is “Hogan,” a room-sized structure of ascending, smooth sanded raw logs piled on the round post and lintel architecture of a Navajo dwelling.

The colors are bright, transparent dyes of oranges and turquoise. “Hogan” is a simple form; open to light, it warmly surrounds the viewer in constantly changing perceptual shifts while the colors have Davis’ usual playful irreverence. If it seems inviting it’s perhaps because the gallery architecture and space is by contrast so cold it seems almost to be held at bay by the natural materials and more human scale of Davis’ sculpture.

The small peg and stick pieces on the gallery walls are also simple. Basically, they are colorfully painted, near raw sticks precisely joined to form geometric shapes like hexagons or to spiral and cantilever off the wall.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see them as more than brief exercises in carpentry decked out in a Southwest look. Indeed, this entire body of work disappoints because it settles too easily for being overgrown Lincoln Logs or thick, designer colored Tinker Toys.

Blum Helman, 916 Colorado, Santa Monica, (213) 451-0955; to July 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.