ART REVIEWS : World of Gonzalez-Torres Teeters on Joy and Despair

The installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery captures the magic of being in a crowd. His piles of brightly wrapped, bite-size candies and stacks of cheaply printed sheets of paper give physical form to the ways individuals get subsumed by massive groups. Simultaneously, facelessness and identity emerge from the contradictory sense of belonging that his art engenders.

The Cuban-born, New York-based artist’s work typically consists of simple images, messages or diagrams printed on hundreds of sheets of neatly stacked paper, or of colorful candies piled by the pound on the floor. From a distance, these accumulations of easy-to-replace items look like the precious, unalterable objects we have come to recognize as works of art. Specifically, they recall Minimalism’s pristine, repeated geometries, which emphasize the brute materiality of the world.

Up close, however, Gonzalez-Torres’ sculptures disintegrate. They are temporary arrangements of uncountable and unremarkable components, rather than unified structures. Their susceptibility to change suggests a fragility at odds with the sheer volume of their innumerable elements. This tension between the promise of abundance and the threat of depletion allows for the possibility of joy without forgetting the prevalence of despair.

Gonzalez-Torres intensifies this sense of vulnerability by inviting his viewers to help themselves to a single sheet from the stacks of prints or to a piece of candy from the mound of sweets. By removing a souvenir from the exhibition, every viewer imperceptibility alters the sculpture. More significantly, each “collector” of the giveaway art joins a process in which individuality comes frighteningly close to insignificance.

If what one takes away from the exhibition is only an object to be owned or consumed, one misses what is interesting in Gonzalez-Torres’ art. The gallery staff simply replenishes the stacks. One’s effect on the sculpture disappears. What counts is the effectiveness with which this art draws individuals together by focusing on usually invisible relationships and intangible connections among people.

“Untitled (NRA)” exemplifies the weird power of numbers at the root of democracy. On the gallery’s floor, this stack of identical, offset prints of a red rectangle bordered by a black band resembles a not-so-shallow pool of blood. With clinical efficiency, the pleasure of Southern California swimming pools collides with an ugly image of bloodshed and death, whose numbing effect is too great to comprehend.

At home, on one’s wall, this nearly 4x5-foot rectangle has the presence of an anemic, Postmodern abstraction--about as powerful or engaging as a faded copy of a Peter Halley painting. Separated from the rest of the images, a single sheet loses its capacity to create meaning and becomes little more than a formal, tasteful design.

Gonzalez-Torres’ work suggests that singularity only counts when it unites with others, exchanging individuality for group indentity. In the beleaguered, public space of the gallery, his art thus reinvests a sense of value and personal identity usually reserved for the privacy of one’s home.

Gonzalez-Torres’ sculptures refuse to be excluded from the mainstream at the same time they reject society’s dominant ideas. His “Minimalism” scrutinizes neither the facts of perception nor the reality of art’s materials, but the social forces that hold us together and tear us apart. It willingly participates in the privileged realm of galleries only by changing the terms with which this institution normally works.

* Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, 1330 4th St., Santa Monica, (31O) 394-3964, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Monday.

Go With the Flow: Flows of milk and floods of honey, drips of blood and puddles of mascara and lipstick appear to be timelessly suspended in the translucent layers of oil and wax that form the thick surfaces of Sabina Ott’s large paintings on mahogany panels. More confident and accomplished than all of her previous works, Ott’s latest images are among the best of her career.

Titled after the Latinate version of “Mother Rose,” her most recent series at Pence Gallery joins geometric grids, colorful bubbles, and the blossoms that symbolize passion and love. Silhouettes of flowers and irregularly placed circles of color--more at home on cosmetic counters than in “serious” paintings--throw this art’s formal order into the chaos of ardor.

Modernism’s acknowledgment of its artificiality gets recast, by Ott, in terms of women’s makeup. What was once celebrated for being “original” and “creative” (in an art made mostly by men) is associated with decoration and the mundane, hope-filled task of applying cosmetics. Qualities once rejected for sharing too much with the feminine world of dressing-up become the basis for an art neither obsessed with original gestures nor embarrassed by the undeniably decorative function of colors and pigments.

If Modernism was concerned to lay bare the devices underlying painting’s irrepressible illusionism, Ott’s layers of wax reveal that even the most resolute abstractions remain somehow associated with the everyday world of desire and subterfuge. Her images renew abstract painting without negating its capacity for representation. They sneak reference, association and narrative back into an art too long obsessed with self-deception--with the illusion of its own supposed “purity.”

* Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-0069, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Thrill a Minute: Excitement and painting rarely come together. When they do, as in Lari Pittman’s latest body of work at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, celebration is a suitable response.

Unlike any other pictures being made today, Pittman’s images thrill. They take your eyes on a wild, roller-coaster ride that leaves your mind struggling to catch up with the unpredictable twists and turns of their shifting, spinning visual labyrinths. Thought is lured out of its established patterns, lazy habits and hackneyed responses by this exuberant abandonment to the pleasures of unfettered optical sensation.

In Pittman’s paintings, a delightfully perverse, polymorphous sexuality confounds categories that restrict and limit thinking. His meticulously rendered images of laughing houses, disembodied ears, butterflies coupling with trees and crying owls drowning in champagne glasses (or wearing crowns, lingerie, and false eyelashes) force painting to engage contemporary social issues in a language that is almost as accessible as Saturday morning cartoons or the Sunday comics.

If Pittman’s aggressively irreverent images are immediately recognizable, their narratives and metaphors are more ambiguous. They avoid the sanctimony of much politically activist art by allowing their viewers the freedom to make what they want out of their dense, multidirectional circuits of symbols, numbers, words, diagrams, designs and drips. The satisfaction of desire always comes before political agendas in Pittman’s paintings.

Unrepentant silliness and deadly seriousness dovetail in meditations on life and death, love and sex. His melanges of mutating creatures and manic concatenations of energized form hold frivolity together with the sadness that accompanies suffering through today’s dark times. Although their rambunctiousness makes them appear to indulge nothing but dumb fun, their gracefulness turns humor into a sobering assessment of where we might find meaning in a consumerist culture, predicated on prescribed desires and manipulated pleasures.

Pittman’s paintings are original because they combine Pop art’s eye-grabbing palette with conventional Realism’s attempt to depict, on a grand and elaborate scale, experiences that identify a public and unify a nation. Pop’s romance with superficiality isn’t used to eliminate ambiguity, but to get more of life’s absurdity into art.

After all, the craziness of the contemporary world--with its accelerating tempo and mind-bogging complexity--outdoes almost anything painting is capable of orchestrating. With this big picture in mind, Pittman’s frenzied and dizzying images look less like art world aberrations and more like the calculated and masterfully crafted works that they are.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Haunted by History: Walking into Theresa Pendlebury’s exhibition at Thomas Solomon’s Garage is like stumbling upon an eccentric great-aunt’s attic, packed with strange objects and mysterious oddities.

The associations with old souvenirs is not accidental. Pendlebury has taken the name of a 19th-Century New York bohemian, Jane McElheney, as a nom de plume for her most recent body of work. Criticized in her own time for imitating Paris’ “true” bohemia, McElheney’s rehashed Romanticism is here given a new, and doubly fictitious life.

Pendlebury is less interested in reconstructing the facts of history than in using its leftovers as a jumping-off point for her own richly humorous and often haunting art. Her most resonant sculptures use common domestic materials associated with femininity--lace, macrame, sequins and beads--not to re-create or recall in memory a world all but lost to history, but to fabricate illusions that affect the present. Blacked-out surfaces abound in Pendlebury’s exhibition, giving voice to the exquisite silences required for the moment to speak.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Nov. 24. Closed Mondays.