ART REVIEWS : Industrial-Strength Sculptures by Mary Brogger

A steel Persian carpet mysteriously floats just above the bare concrete floor of the Christopher Grimes Gallery. It is accompanied by a functional settee made from a thinner gauge of the same material, a rusting chandelier whose ice-cube coating drips like a slow-motion, low-tech shower, and the silhouette of a curtain sprayed in enamel on a 10-foot-square roll-up garage door.

These industrial-strength sculptures make up the first West Coast solo show of Chicago-based artist Mary Brogger. Like the other works she has exhibited over the past eight years, they infuse their surroundings with the aura of domestic tranquillity run hopelessly amok.

By carrying the demand for the comforts provided by a stable refuge to their illogical extremes, her installation gives form to the deathliness that underlies the desire to preserve an aristocratic notion of the home. Elegant, yet menacing, Brogger’s steel renditions of woven wool, silk cushions, lace tapestries and strung glass expose the perversions built into the pleasures of refinement and taste. At the same time, they play upon the fact that these satisfactions have all but vanished from contemporary living.

The rug that partially covers almost 130 square feet of the floor stands out as Brogger’s best piece. Its intricate forms are both beautiful and threatening, clearly the result of a process of violent transformation, executed for no other purpose than aesthetic effect. Unlike the chandelier, it is absolutely static. Unlike the door-painting, it is too big and aggressive to function as decoration.

Brogger’s see-through carpet stunningly combines the attractions of pattern-and-decoration painting with the impersonal severity of minimalist sculpture. It succeeds as both painting and sculpture because it deals effectively with illusionism as it denies the dominance of utility. Paradoxically, it thus dominates the space.

Brightly lit, its shiny metallic plane lacks the substantiality of the shadows it casts on the floor. Brogger’s two-dimensional sculpture seems both weightless and ponderous. It slips into the realm between reality and fantasy, disappearing as a physical presence as it gives concrete form to intangible ideas and undeniable fears.

The myriad, nearly invisible three-inch pins that support the weight of the steel rug symbolize the menace at work in Brogger’s sculpture. With grace and understatement, her work insidiously and powerfully assaults the foundations of representation and pleasure, giving substance to the pain at the basis of each.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 1644 17th St., Santa Monica, 310-450-5962, through Feb. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Exercise in Monotony: Nothing original or disciplined, even whimsical or inventive, enters Peter Plagens’ abstract paintings at Jan Baum Gallery. His large, mixed-media works on canvas and paper have the flavor of reheated leftovers from the smorgasbord of academic art history. Thinned out recapitulations of gestural abstraction hang listlessly behind watered-down whitewashes of formulaic monochrome painting in tiresome rehashes of styles mimicked from modern art textbooks.

Plagens has been Newsweek’s art critic since 1988 and an abstract painter for almost 30 years. His latest group of predominantly white paintings gives form to the relationship between words and images without, however, allowing the logic of one to affect the structure of the other. What we’re served up in this monotonous exhibition is a version of writing that has no purchase on visual phenomena and a kind of painting that lacks any grasp of writing’s sense.

Plagens’ paintings consist of tenuous lines scrawled in crayon and pencil over canvases covered with thin coats of white primer. These erratic, aimless lines sometimes take the shape of indistinct organic forms, such as bulbs or pods, or cross one another in schematic, barely present grids. For the most part, though, they meander around the canvas as if they had no place to go, even no real purpose. They record a light touch, not one of lassitude, certainly not one of lyricism, but one of utter pointlessness, of a tentativeness so extreme that they seem to trace nothing more than the dilettantish desire to begin a painting.

The ensuing strokes get bigger and thicker as various shades of gray begin to fill in the canvas’ original blankness. With each accumulating layer, Plagens moves further away from marks that resemble the linearity of writing--of symbols made with pointed implement--and toward painting--of surface defined by large fields, gestures and two-dimensional forms.

Plagens then paints out, with an opaque layer of pure white, more than half of his preceding efforts to fill in emptiness. On top of this painterly blankness, he adds a rectangle or other straight-edged shape in bright red, green or blue, with a couple of other colors, such as yellow or orange, located within its perimeter. The only flash of color in otherwise bland black-and-white fields, these miniature symbols stand in as surrogates for the visual power of successful abstract painting.

Plagens’ works are finished not when a point is made or an argument is completed, nor when a problem is resolved and something new is discovered in the process of playing shape against line or translucence against opacity, but when a pleasant arrangement has been composed. His canvases aren’t paintings: they’re designs, illustrations made by someone outside the art, someone who does not understand, let alone share, its commitments and priorities.

If writing, for Plagens, traces the movement of his thoughts and records the structure of his argumentation, then painting, for him, occupies a territory outside of language, external to its machinations and influence. The problems with this kind of thinking are evident in his exhibition. His paintings do little more than raise serious questions about his practice as a critic.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., 213-932-0170, through Feb. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Chalk Talk: Gary Simmons’ “Erasure Drawings” seem to be the work of a fast-paced cartoonist who sneaked up to the chalkboard and left his mark for all his classmates to see, at least until the teacher returns and restores order. His smudged sketches of the five crows from “Dumbo the Elephant” combine the illicit tenor of graffiti with the transitoriness of performance in monochromatic pictures that are surprisingly elegant.

Simmons draws in chalk on paper covered with the paint used to repair blackboards. His crows, in various stages of effacement, turn racist stereotypes against themselves by complicating, literalizing and punning upon simplified visions of African-Americans. Rather than allowing his color to be written upon by others, the artist draws upon its power to confound the prejudice we bring to “blank slates,” “black boards,” “Jim Crow” laws, “eating crow” and “black face.”

His haunting drawings evoke difficult memories that will not fade and troublesome habits that will not go away. In contrast to most cartoon-inspired art being made today, Simmons’ is persuasive in its understated power.

* Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, through Feb. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Intimate Nightmares: Ellen Phelan is best known for her elegiac monochromes--almost imageless pictures of vanishing landscapes shrouded in dense mists that render the world mysteriously potent in its vacant presence.

Her 42 “Doll Drawings,” at Asher/Faure Gallery, rendered in gouache and watercolor over the past six years, turn the ambiguous charge of her large-scale paintings into an intimate nightmare, one in which an unflinching scrutiny of the seductive but repugnant relationships that define our connection to the world flip between choice and determination.

Phelan’s works on paper take up a supposedly harmless realm of playtime and fantasy that outdoes any of Freud’s darkest reflections on childhood dementia. In the world pictured by her depictions of dolls and toys, cake decorations and play-things, childhood takes on the powers that prevent us from ever leaving its identity-defining relationships.

Phelan’s art demands attention in its refusal to allow us to grow up, if this means forgetting the traumas at the roots of our identities. Her doll watercolors return us to the bases of existence in which our (supposedly adult) confidence is always undermined by uncertainty and diffidence. Never fun, but unrepentantly immature, her drawings always insist on the inconsistencies that make up our selves.

* Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 271-3665, through Feb. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.