ART REVIEW : More Than Meets the Eye

The graffiti that seem to festoon every available wall in town strike most people as an obscene blight signaling urban erosion and lurking violence. Dennis Hopper may agree, but he sees more to them, witness his current Corcoran Gallery exhibition. He sees the same kind of romantic authenticity in graffiti that led him to make heroes out of losers in films from the bikers of “Easy Rider” to the gang kids of “Colors.”

Hopper is best known as an actor and auteur -style filmmaker in the mold of Orson Welles or Wim Wenders. Before all that, he was an artist profoundly impressed by the abstractions of Richard Diebenkorn and Emerson Woelffer. He saw them in the early collections of people such as Vincent Price and Billy Wilder. He was a member of the crowd around the Ferus Gallery in the dawning glory days of L.A. art. When the great 1961 Bel-Air fire destroyed more than 100 of his canvases, he took to doing photo-assemblage.

Filming “Colors,” he became fascinated with the vandalized walls he saw around L.A. He developed a kind of expertise in understanding its often enigmatic hieroglyphic language. Unlike the virtuoso imagery of New York’s individualistic graffiti artists, Hopper says L.A. gang graffiti is about group solidarity and its marks convey information concerning such vital matters as turf borders, rivals tagged for revenge and the best places to score drugs.

The painter within was attracted to the extra visual interest added by the city’s dogged attempts to efface the defacement. Bad boys do their thing with spray cans followed by stolid citizens wielding censorious paint rollers that blot out the graffiti but leave behind unruly rectangular Rothkoesque shapes. Gang members then seem to take mordant pleasure in spraying more offensive matter on top of them.

Hopper’s exhibition consists of some 40 enlarged Polaroids of defaced walls and 10 large paintings based on them. The photos aestheticize these signs of urban civil war into a kind of poetry of the absurd.

Artists are permitted perverse senses of humor. One elegantly funny rendering of a heroic female breast looks like a collaboration between Matisse and Dubuffet. A curious “Venice Angel” is an unconscious hommage to Billy Al Bengston. An odd shape that could be our last view of the Statue of Liberty sinking would have tickled the late Philip Guston.

Two of Hopper’s large untitled paintings don’t come off, probably because they are more-or-less literal glosses on straight spray marks that were not very interesting to start with. The artist glows, however, in compositions that use combinations of graffiti and roller-shapes on surfaces that approximate the texture of stucco--a situation made for someone whose heart belongs to Abstract Expressionism.

Hopper is a deft colorist and placer of shapes in muted, matte-finished compositions. A virtuoso Rorschach-like orchestration of tans, olives and blued slate grays evokes the urbane spirit of Robert Motherwell.

There is real tension between Hopper’s sweet sophistication as a painter and the jolt of the underbelly allusions. Put together they are like a melding of jazz and rap.

A less straightforward artist might not have been so forthcoming about the sources of his painting, but Hopper likes to be frank in agreeing with Jean Cocteau’s admission that 90% of art is accident. Maybe that’s because Hopper is also like Cocteau in being one of those rare artists who can do more than one thing really well.

James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica; to Feb. 1, closed Sundays and Mondays; (310) 451-0950.