ART REVIEWS : Burton Telegraphs His Strong Visual Punch

Richmond Burton, in his second solo show of abstract paintings at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, moves beyond the problems that riddled his debut exhibition here almost two years ago. The New York-based artist’s new works no longer try to attach themselves to art history by stylishly revising the look of some of its masterpieces.

Unlike Burton’s earlier, single-panel pieces, which offered up minor adjustments to Frank Stella’s magisterial “Black Paintings” (1958-60), his latest works do not settle for being, at best, minor footnotes to academic art history, or, at worst, opportunistic gambits to gain fame by turning the achievements of an established modernist into a pedigree for himself. Instead, they struggle to discover unforeseen ways to create the visual punch and conceptual clarity that has animated the best non-representational painting of this century.

“Thought Plane Assembly 2” links Burton’s earlier black paintings to his latest explorations of color’s place in the compositional structure of an image. It consists of 20 rectangular canvases attached to one another by the wooden struts of rudimentary compasses, which the artist used to make the concentric arcs that cover the surfaces of each section of the monochromatic painting.

This multi-part work suggests that Burton has cut up his earlier paintings and used the resulting parts to build a new, potentially rearrangeable image. “Thought Plane” thus cannibalizes the artist’s previous canvases in the same way they tried to cannibalize art history.

Burton’s five other paintings employ a more illusionistic tension between orbs of bright colors and diagonal grids. “Birth Bloom” is a 6-foot square canvas divided into colorful triangles that pair up to form diamonds; each contains, but is obscured by, a flat, black blob that initially appears to be a perfect circle, but then resembles the silhouette of a living cell just before it replicates. The overall effect is a jittery, all-over movement set up by the interactive lattice-work of the light-sucking black and the brilliant, underlying colors that bound forward from behind.

“Gold” intensifies this play between figure and ground--or foreground and background--by allowing some of the unpainted canvas to show through around the lines of the underlying grid. “Metabolism” adds another level by covering the structure of “Gold” with a layer of floating ovals.

Although these paintings represent a significant break from Burton’s literal mimicry of art history’s established forms, they still remain too constricted by modern abstraction’s obsession with simple visual ambivalence, wholly within the parameters of figure-ground relationships. They suggest that any interrogation of painting must involve a more thorough exploration of its indebtedness to decoration and the role color plays in composition.

Since modern painting has generally been uncomfortable with these issues, this might provide an original way out of the formalist cul-de-sac from which Burton is currently struggling to escape.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, ( 310 ) 453-0180, through Jan. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Assault on the Senses: From its tunnel-like entrance--where each visitor must climb into a garbage bag and wade through a pool of dirty water--to its six dark chambers filled with crude images, oversize silhouettes made from cheap materials, eerie lights shining through plastic sheets and relentless cacophony of projected slides, audio tapes, automatic garage-door openers and a messy pile of synchronized computer screens and printers, “Destination L.A.” assaults your senses.

Unlike most politically engaged art, this installation at LACE by San Diego’s Border Art Workshop doesn’t preach to the art world’s converted or even deliver any sort of unequivocal message. Accompanied by six continually running videos (and five performances that took place Dec. 20), it simply presents a condensed and intensified version of life as it criss-crosses the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Rather than telling anyone what to think of the current, unworkable situation in which U.S. officialdom willingly exploits undocumented laborers while rejecting them as “illegal aliens,” “Destination L.A.” offers a theatricalized nightmare that grabs your attention more effectively than almost any work normally exhibited in galleries in this city.

If making art out of the misery of an uncounted population seems contradictory, this problem pales in comparison to the cruel contradictions that are an everyday reality for the people caught between two countries whose governmental hypocrisies collide on an arbitrary but devastating line somewhere between San Diego and Tijuana.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Singing of ‘Things’: A sort of blue-collar ethos gives many of Karl Matson’s sculptures their poignant kick. This no-nonsense directness, however, also threatens to swamp the effectiveness of his found and slightly altered objects.

The simple poetry of Matson’s immediately recognizable, mundane “things” at Meyers/Bloom Gallery sometimes gets lost in the shuffle from the everyday world of ordinary life to the rarefied realm of high art collectibles. Take “Clean House,” a roll of toilet paper and a plunger, respectively made from a coil of copper and cast brass and lead. What is meant to refer to life’s most basic processes--and the (almost universal) difficulties of making a livable home in the face of scarcity and bad plumbing--becomes, in the pristine gallery, little more than a stylish addition to Duchamp’s dysfunctional yet notoriously enshrined urinal.

Fortune cookies cast in lead, paper airplanes made from folded metal, brooms cast in brass, a chrome-plated go-cart, resin coated shoes and grocery bags made of stainless steel don’t fit so neatly into categories established by such revered art historical precedents. Even so, Matson’s carefully arranged objects signify a fundamental disjuncture between the stories he wants to tell and their location in an art gallery, a place of refined taste which usually excludes the run-of-the-mill associations essential to his art.

In contrast, “American Myth” stands out as a work whose materials accentuate the meanings of the objects they constitute. It consists of a gold-plated basketball hoop high on the wall, a bronze basketball resting on the floor and a metal silhouette of a machine gun leaning against the wall.

Although indebted to other sculptures--David Hammons’ out-of-reach hoops, Gary Simmons’ gold-plated sport shoes, Jeff Koons’ basketballs floating in aquariums and his lead life-preservers--Matson’s incarnation efficiently and originally conveys the way dreams, reality and nightmares all come together in everyday occurrences. Ordinary events are turned into extraordinary experiences without losing the resonance of the mundane.

* Meyers/Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-0062, through Jan. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Masterful Mix: A small but solid exhibition of photographs by Mark Klett inaugurates the Paul Kopeikin Gallery. Dating from 1982-89, Klett’s 17 images of the Western United States masterfully mix the casualness of snap-shots with the dramatic grandeur of 19th-Century landscape photography. His images are strong without being overstated, accessible yet distinctive.

Klett was trained as a geologist and his photographs tend to intimate the passage of millennia. He favors rocks whose contours have been worn smooth by wind and water, as well as scenes in which people seem like welcome but extraneous visitors to a world that’s been around since long before they entered the picture and will likewise outlast their most intrusive actions.

Even Klett’s pictures of the Grand Canyon manage to downplay nature’s raw force and daunting power in favor of emphasizing the slow, ongoing and uninterruptable processes of erosion that made--and will eventually unmake--this monument to sublimity.

His photographs often focus on vistas whose clarity seems just about to dissolve into a mysterious, yet still distinct serenity. Their sublimity has nothing to do with the terror of the infinite or the insignificance of any individual before nature’s incomprehensible vastness, but with the quiet wisdom that accompanies knowing one’s relation to an eternally changing world.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N . La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Shelton in Wonderland: Peter Shelton’s extremely heavy but seemingly weightless bronze sculptures lull your mind to rest as they draw you into a dreamy, Alice-in-Wonderland world of distorted organs, gigantic animalistic things, and weirdly familiar anthropomorphic shirts. The artist’s double exhibition at both branches of L.A. Louver Gallery lets you shut off your mind without asking you to stop thinking.

His goofy, transmogrified items of clothing and funny biomorphic inventions trick one into perceiving with one’s guts. The appeal of Shelton’s art is first of all visceral. Their beautifully worked surfaces, sensuous contours and user-friendly locations invite not the curious finger pokes that sculptures often elicit, but open palm touches--even caresses--of your whole hand.

The real power of Shelton’s sculptures lies in what they do to your viscera. Visiting his installations (titled “shirts” and “monstermawbaggutheaderhead”) feels like being touched from the inside of your body--mostly in the pit of your stomach--but also all the way up to the top of your windpipe and down to the bottom of your bowels. Many of Shelton’s works resemble living musical instruments: they reach out toward our mouths, preventing us from speaking but inviting other, more intimate sorts of oral exchanges.

The variety and subtlety of the bodily responses concocted by Shelton’s objects are remarkable. In an art world that increasingly emphasizes the body by too often turning it into a totally vulnerable, dumb, and even pitifully literal lump of flesh, Shelton’s art acts as a refreshing antidote to over-intellectualization of the flesh. His sculptures put pleasure back into art--and, more importantly, back into our bodies, where we can experience it for ourselves.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd. and 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Jan. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.