ART REVIEW : John Millei: Strangely Alienated

John Millei’s large-scale and largely monochromatic paintings hold Romanticism and Mannerism together in an uneasy tension that pits beauty against emptiness. Mere prettiness is the enemy his art attacks in its attempt to give abstraction a contemporary edge.

References to mechanical reproduction--such as the stencils used in printing, the dots used in comics and the silver nitrate used in photography--ensure that his works are not concerned to pursue some outdated notion of aesthetic “purity.” Millei’s paintings are as provisional and contingent as anything else in the world.

They often push their indebtedness to modern technologies of reproduction to such extreme pitches that their supposedly authentic gestures appear to be manufactured by machines. The marks that once registered the spontaneous improvisations of the artist become, in Millei’s hands, devices to distance his labor from its results.

In this strangely alienated arena--in which deviousness and subterfuge preempt straightforward sincerity--his paintings maintain abstraction’s vitality. They balance faith in an individual’s actions against the conviction that truth comes from the formulas established by tradition.

Millei’s often exuberant but never expressive paintings occupy a territory between cynicism and conviction. With finesse and elan, they steal their pleasures from a world increasingly hostile to these satisfactions.

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