ART REVIEWS : Gilbert-Rolfe’s Monochromes Push Modernism to the Edge

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s new works are less abstract paintings than sophisticated essays about abstract painting. Their appeal is neither emotional (no impassioned brushwork means no soul-shaking catharses); nor is it primarily aesthetic (in these images, the manipulation of light, color and structure is underwhelming, at best). The hook, by contrast, is unabashedly intellectual: The paintings use the language of postmodern critique to infiltrate--and then to subvert--the sacrosanct space of modernism.

Functioning as a series, rather than as a group of idiosyncratic objects, the mid-sized paintings represent variations upon a single theme. The colors oscillate between bright primaries and baby pinks, grays and blues, but the composition is always the same: a monochrome canvas marked, at the far left edge, with a long, narrow stripe.

The stripe self-consciously recalls the “zips” that animate Barnett Newman’s large-scale abstractions; but divided into vertical sections of contrasting colors, each carefully lined in black pencil, the restyled “zip” doubles as an attenuated model of Piet Mondrian’s stacked rectangles--no longer a heroicized mark of the sublime, no longer a geometrized ode to equilibrium, but an impossible distortion.

Reflected in postmodernism’s fun-house mirror, Gilbert-Rolfe’s stripes ricochet between homage and parody. More significantly, they cleverly reconfigure the embattled space of painting. Stretched, squeezed and jammed up against the edge, these stripes take modernist abstraction and literally marginalize it, forcing it to make room (or rather, to give it all up) for that which is to follow.

But what is that? Gilbert-Rolfe’s paintings--replete, though virtually empty--mime the cavernous space opened up by postmodern inquiry--but they stop just short of answering the question. For now, however, asking it seems to be more than enough.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 935-4411, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Empty Metaphors: Magdalena Abakanowicz seizes upon the metaphor of the “hollow men”--exploited so powerfully by T.S. Eliot in his eponymous poem of 1925--and literalizes it in her huge, raw and very troubling sculptures at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery.

Fashioned either in bronze or in heavily resinated burlap, presented in groups or singly, these works most resemble broken casts of the human body--rough, scabrous and encrusted, as if dredged up from the bottom of the earth or dragged back from the other reaches of time.

Twelve headless and armless figures are lined up in neat rows--faceless torsos facing forward. From the front, they are massive--heavy, sodden, balanced on long, thick legs; from the side, they are wholly without substance--pure facade. These are shadow-objects, less bodies than traces of bodies, less presence than absence. What they are meant to signify is the mind-numbing emptiness of modern life, and more viscerally, the heart-scraping void within.

Dehumanization is made literal here. Abakanowicz’s creatures are sexless, without genitals, breasts, or suggestive curves. Their soft flesh devolves into burlap “hide,” crumpled and folded like elephant skin. In one of the more shocking pieces, a seated form--headless, hunched over, impassive--is placed unceremoniously in an iron cage, the animal metaphor laid bare. Abakanowicz goes so far as to mount several bronze animal skulls on high, thick spikes, thus restaging the entire show as a display in a museum of natural history--a damning record of a lost, if not necessarily human, species.

Sometimes, however, a metaphor can be a dangerous thing. And in 1991, when the next lost species may well be our own, insisting upon the physical as a metaphor for the spiritual is not only misleading--it is morally irresponsible. The body is not the mirror of the soul. Nor is it a manifestation of spiritual strength or weakness. The body is simply the body. Abakanowicz needs to acknowledge this; and then the rest of us need to do something about it.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (213) 395-0222, through Nov. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Born to Adorn: In the happily bipartisan world of painter Richard Lee, motorcyclists and church elders can both feel right at home. Here, the snarling tattoo imagery of L.A.’s favorite subculture--fang-bearing motorheads dripping crimson splats of blood, silver chains tightly wound, and hearts brutally pierced by daggers--exchanges looks across an uncrowded room with the circumspect imagery of the middle-class home--lace doilies, decorative finishes, ruffled fabrics, attractive wallpaper.

Of course, the bikers and grandmas don’t get under each other’s skin because both have been comfortably anesthetized in the space of Lee’s large, exquisitely painted images. What the artist seems to suggest, in any case, is that the tattoo and the doily have a great deal in common.

Lee’s work is, above all, about ornamentation, and both are equally complicit in its machinations. Both express a dissatisfaction with the utilitarian and the unadorned, and seek to embellish it in order to express something about personal style. One is ostensibly naughty, the other nice; but they are equally poignant insofar as they are equally bogged down by convention.

The surfaces upon which Lee floats these signifiers of taste and class are marvels of trompe l’oeil-- magnificent swirls of rust and brown resembling highly burnished teak; hazy octagons of pink and blue mimicking the incandescence of blown glass. These surfaces are illusionistic, but they are unconcerned by the politics of illusion. Instead, they revel in their hard-won beauty.

While tattoos and doilies are largely consigned to the benighted realm of the decorative, painting is regularly privileged as “high” art. However, in using trompe l’oeil, itself most often dismissed as decorative, Lee insists that there is really little distinction between them.

Painting is his ornament of choice, but it is an ornament, nonetheless. In this, Lee’s sensuous images reject the knee-jerk romanticization of painting, and emerge as less bipartisan than egalitarian.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., (213) 399-7024, through Saturday.

Frustrated Images: Also of note are the new paintings of British-born artist John Walker, which mire personal, quasi-figural symbols in thick, richly textured fields of paint. Many of the symbols are vaguely familiar--a hand, an eye, a sharply truncated torso; and indeed, they are derived from well-known sources--the hand, from Van Gogh’s “Sorrow,” the torso from Goya’s “Duchess of Alba,” and so on.

But Walker is interested neither in conjuring specific narratives, nor in fabricating an art historical lineage. Instead, his work explores the perhaps impossible exigencies of painting’s two-dimensional space. Walker’s enigmatic forms build and punctuate that space. But in the best of his paintings, they are also subordinate to it, never overwhelming the densely layered pigment and the gritty, congested surface that provides the work with its unavoidable feeling of suffocation.

There is light in these images--they are mostly white, with accents of black, brown and pink--but there is no air. And there are forms that are faintly recognizable, but there is no necessary logic to their arrangement.

There is something, Walker seems to insist, that is sorely amiss; perhaps it is simply the quixotic desire to wrest painting’s two dimensions into three, to re-create the sensate world instead of using art to create another. Walker’s paintings portray confusion without succumbing to it. For this, they are both important and timely.

* L.A. Louver, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., (213) 822-4955, through Saturday.