ART REVIEWS : L.A. Exhibit Reveals Merrild’s Comic Side

The comic side of Modernist Abstraction sneaks out of hiding in an exhibition of works from the 1930s and ‘40s by Knud Merrild (1908-54). About 30 small drawings, odd collages, pristine reliefs and poured paintings at the Steve Turner Gallery chart the Danish artist’s sudden transformation.

Throughout the ‘30s, Merrild’s art consisted of meticulously crafted reliefs and delicate drawings that illustrated the formal principles at the root of Cubism. Where Picasso and Braque favored colliding planes and dissolving illusions, Merrild stuck to the abstract representation of readily identifiable objects.

His simplified still-lifes and schematic biomorphic forms possess a flat-footed charm that saves them from being merely derivative. Always unassuming and sometimes downright funny, his little pictures astound in their willingness to take the perceptual uncertainties of Cubism as a stable basis for picture-making.

Remarkably, the harmony and balance--even stasis--of Merrild’s early works completely deny Cubism’s radical doubts about illusionism, while his images seem to remain true to that style’s intentions and procedures.

In the early ‘40s, Merrild abandoned his attempt to work through the artistic strategies established by European Modernism. He began to pour and drip tiny streams of oil paint onto small canvases in patterns governed by gravity and the ways different enamels chemically react with one another.

What resulted was a curious and original body of work that anticipated Pollock’s famous drip paintings from 1947-50 and established Merrild as an inventor of a new pictorial order. He called these works his “Flux Paintings.”

Although art historians are quick to note the similarities between Merrild’s pours and Pollock’s drips, too many differences distinguish these artists from one another. Claiming significance for Merrild’s paintings in terms of Pollock’s canvases is a form of reverse discrimination--it bolsters the authority of cliched accounts of Modernism by allowing under-recognized artists into history only when they seem to echo the achievements of accepted masters.

Despite the resolute abstractness of Merrild’s “Flux Paintings,” they maintain the whimsical sense of humor of his earlier works. They are original because they employ a sort of Surrealist-derived automatic writing without referring to the artist’s unconscious or representing authentically expressive traces of his inarticulate inner self.

Merrild’s mutant designs anticipate much of what is interesting in Process Art and Pattern-and-Decoration paintings. Their unnatural palette and noxious viscosity also locate them as the sources for much Californian abstraction since the ‘60s that has used industrial materials such as resin and Plexiglas.

More humorous than authoritative, his paintings are fecund without being seminal. If their lack of bombast has kept them out of the spotlight for almost 50 years, it has also preserved their richness for anyone willing to follow their idiosyncratic, quiet movements.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 7220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 931-1185, through Saturday.

Childhood Visions: In Robert Gil de Montes’ clumsy paintings, childhood sometimes returns. When it does, it comes back as a troubled time when wisdom accompanied simplicity.

For the most part, however, his crudely rendered images of masked figures and symbolic objects do not recapture the integrity and directness possessed by children, but demonstrate that wanting to conjure the power of a child’s imagination is no simple task.

Gil de Montes’ attempts to make paintings based on artlessness often fall flat because they forget that figurative images depend, for their effectiveness, upon sophistication, illusion and deception. By trying to deny artifice and lies, his paintings usually end up as hackneyed renditions of yesterday’s original pictures rather than as today’s manifestations of childhood innocence.

The best works in his exhibition at Jan Baum Gallery acknowledge both the silliness of children and the deceptiveness at the basis of figurative painting.

When Gil de Montes scales down his paintings and focuses on totally theatrical subjects--such as figures dressed as jaguars, mosquitoes or fish--his images take on a dream-like quality in which anything seems possible. When his art avoids the portentous oversimplifications it too often indulges, it achieves a freshness paralleled only by the vision of a child.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Latino Diversity: “Chicano and Latino: Parallels and Divergence--One Heritage, Two Paths,” brings together the work of 18 artists of Latino descent, including six who live in the United States.

Part I at the Daniel Saxon Gallery (Part II comes next month and Parts III & IV follow next summer at the Kimberly Gallery in Washington) demonstrates that Latino art doesn’t divide neatly into coherent styles or consistent themes. If anything, ambivalence toward tradition unites its divergent works.

Rather than separating into two categories--works made inside or outside the United States--the art here embodies internal divisions. Most struggle between being empowered by the past and enslaved by its authority. They waver between celebrating their cultural heritage and trying to break free from the suffering that has accompanied their history.

For example, Patssi Valdez’s altar pays homage to the power of the Roman Catholic Church, while distancing itself from that institution’s rituals. Her musical shrine is made of glitter-covered Christian figures balancing miniature mirrored disco chandeliers and plastic fruits on their heads and hands.

Although her work is pure kitsch, it doesn’t mock belief as much as it preserves it as a lost dream. A thin scrim hangs, like a veil of tears, in front of Valdez’s theatrical extravaganza, shrouding its glitz in the vagueness of old memories.

Figurative images by Paul Sierra, Miguel Padura, Luis Serrano, John Valadez, Christina Fernandez and Ignacio Iturria also take a sort of split stance toward the past, or a doubled view of contemporary reality.

In their art, businessmen cavort like angels in the sky, a mechanical arm intrudes into an otherwise serene nightscape, mythical figures sprout from the bodies of a couple wearing bathing suits, a prone figure reaches for coins that have been displaced to the photographer’s frame, and tiny cartoons play soccer under a thickly painted stool.

“One Heritage, Two Paths” suggests that any single style of representation is inadequate to the task of capturing the complexity of contemporary existence, especially when one’s culture is not dominant. If “one heritage” emerges from the exhibition, its “two paths” crisscross so many times that they no longer lead anywhere in particular, but catch the viewer in the labyrinth that is today’s world culture.

* Daniel Saxon Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-8105, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Cynical Mechanics: 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 abstractions’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 Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.