ART REVIEWS : Reading Between the Lines

Antonella Piemontese, whose provocative new work is on view at Jan Turner Gallery, is part of an expanding group of younger artists who are revitalizing Conceptualism by insisting upon, rather than evading, the art object. For these artists, the idea is as crucial as it was for their predecessors, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, et al.; but it is no more crucial than the thing in, upon, or through which that idea is transmitted.

What interests Piemontese here are the rules that govern reading, those unvarying protocols which assure us that if we follow procedure, we will be rewarded with the intended meaning. To that end, she appropriates words, letters, numbers, phrases and images from various books and magazines and arranges them on wooden panels in counterintuitive patterns.

Sometimes, they form mini-narratives which wind around the pieces of graph paper upon which they are typed in spiraling configurations--now vertical, now horizontal, now backward, now right-side up.

Sometimes, they form nonsensical but pleasingly alliterative chains which trip across the tops and bottoms of the pages like decorative borders. On other occasions, they are concealed behind stripes of boldly colored paint.

What this play does is something quite serious. In denaturalizing the process of reading, Piemontese insists upon meaning as structurally and situationally grounded--and thus emphatically open. The meaning of her own work is not exempt. The viewer can experience it on a primarily intellectual level, or derive pleasure from its spare elegance. Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967: “Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.” Piemontese’s work suggests that the same thing is never the same thing, but ever--and properly--in flux.

* Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through March 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Condensed Creativity: The protracted history of Western landscape painting demonstrates that, poet Joyce Kilmer notwithstanding, it is not only God who can make a tree. In making a tree--or a stream, a meadow, a grotto, a mountain--the artist becomes a god, appropriating the power of creation in order to fabricate a universe of his own devising.

The irony of such longstanding equations--artist with God, aestheticized object with nature--provides the impetus for Tina Hulett’s highly intelligent, highly seductive “naturepaintings” at Jan Turner Gallery.

The quotation marks are essential since these startling works are neither strictly paintings, nor exclusively about nature. Here, disparate artifacts of the earth’s munificence--oak leaves, wax and minerals--are congealed into tightly packed, five-foot squares. Obdurately opaque, these object-images hang upon the wall, coyly refusing their function as windows onto the world--painting’s traditional mandate.

You cannot see “through” them to the world outside, nor can you see “in” them the world as envisioned by the artist. Instead of the mythology of illusionism or the theatrics of expressionism, these works offer a deadpan acknowledgement of the unbridgeable--and discomfitting--distance between art and the Real.

Where the commodification of culture reigns, the commodification of nature is a given. Indeed, built into the landscape tradition is the knowledge that our encounters with nature are always already filtered through images--thus the tendency to declare, before a particularly beautiful vista, “My, it’s as pretty as a picture.”

Hulett makes explicit the predigested nature of such experiences by compressing the earth’s displaced paraphernalia into tidy squares suitable for easy consumption. Like condensed milk, these squares evince horror vacui, packing a bigger wallop per millimeter than the unadulterated version; like the films you can see in Monument Valley, Utah, to prepare you for the awe-inspiring experience of the “original,” they embody the hyper-real.

Hulett’s interest, however, is not in privileging nature’s much-ballyhooed anarchy over culture’s endlessly bemoaned order. Indeed, her wax works--as dense as honeycomb, as irregular as driftwood and as spiky as coral--conjure organic forms while simultaneously alluding to industrial materials such as stucco and corrugated cardboard. What this very challenging work does suggest is that nature and culture are finally indistinguishable--and equally estranged from an ever elusive Real.

* Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453 , through March 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays .

Yorkshire Padding: William Tillyer’s hand-colored monotype and limited edition “mixografias,” or mixed-media prints, hide behind the fabled lyricism of the English countryside.

One cannot argue with the delicacy of his largely abstract images, inspired by the artist’s native Yorkshire; they are acutely sensitive to the vicissitudes of light, color and rhythm.

Yet neither can one become too excited by their diffidence--their pastel colors, their reductive forms, their insistence on the safety net of referentiality.

The name of this suite of prints, “Living in Arcadia,” alludes to the title of Poussin’s painting, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” which reveals Tillyer’s desire to locate his work within a particular tradition: the classicizing landscape. Yet the work is resoundingly modernist.

This is not the problem; the problem is that Tillyer’s quick, broad, open brushwork--like many of modernism’s signature strokes--too quickly becomes formulaic.

The unrelenting sameness of this work compromises its considerable pretensions. Tillyer’s vocabulary falls short of the lyrical insofar as it is entirely unvaried, limited to a single, calligraphic trope: the comma- or apostrophe-like swirl. Arranged side by side, or circling around a central axis like the petals of a flower, these marks are sweet and light--and nothing more.

The textural quality is what is most interesting here. Whereas traditional graphic technology limits the artist to working on a base of metal, wood or stone, “mixografia” allows any element--hard or soft, organic or inorganic--to function as the matrix of the printing plate. The artist builds up the surface, or carves into it to create texture and/or relief. A copper plate is then made from the master in reverse form; monotypes or limited editions are printed from this plate.

In Tillyer’s works, the paper is printed wet, so that it absorbs the impressions the artist has designed. The result is a remarkably lively surface whose broad range of incident--dips, arabesques, seams, sashays, ridges and near-bubbles--is at odds with the literal (and metaphoric) flatness of the images. Perhaps when Tillyer expands his pictorial lexicon--and breaks out of lyricism’s stranglehold--he will be better equipped to exploit the impressive technology at his disposal.

* Remba Gallery, 918 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 576-1011 , through March 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays .

Step This Way: A set of pine steps with two risers stands in front of a vast canvas painted a dull, unvariegated shade of black. The 7 1/2x14-foot “‘picture” doesn’t so much hang on the white wall at Angles Gallery as coat it, absorb it, envelop it--along with the viewer poised before it.

Overwhelming and minimal at the same time, the painting provides the backdrop for a drama that is due to unfold. The pale-toned steps say nothing, but they imply both a journey and a destination.

A stairway to heaven? A passage to India? The high road, or a road leading nowhere?

This curious tableau, the “first refrain” of Allan Graham’s extended visual poem, “Cave of Generation,” reactivates a very old, very romantic notion of painting. The key postulate is this: The work of art is a vehicle that can carry the engaged viewer off to another time and place, to a state of meditative withdrawal, into speculation, toward revelation.

Postmodern theory has, of course, dismissed such notions as ideologically loaded; the painting is not a metaphysical site, but a material object, a commodity ripe for fetishization. The seduction--and the danger--of Graham’s art is that it makes what we know to be a retrogressive formulation seem wildly progressive.

The group of paintings that comprises “Cave of Generation” consists of two “refrains” (the second the mirror image of the first), and in between them, 16 “passages,” each 7 1/2 feet tall and ranging in width from three to 14 feet. The composition of these images is restricted to expanses of black, gray, ochre and white, juxtaposed in various combinations: the canvas sliced into two rectangles of black and white, a slash of black interrupting a field of white, and so on.

Due to space limitations, the current installation is limited to the “first refrain” and six of the “passages.” Since the cycle has been fragmented, however, it is difficult to experience it as one would a poem. The rhythm has been altered, the transitions are presumably less fluid, and the “second refrain”--the work’s all-important coda--is absent. Nevertheless, the paintings work powerfully as discrete units.

Graham has learned a great deal from predecessors such as Barnett Newman, whose Herculean fields of color codified modernist painting as spiritual theater. Yet the anxiety of influence is nowhere in evidence, for the territory that Graham stakes out for himself is emphatically Postmodern. In insisting upon the presence of the pine steps, Graham evinces a canny self-consciousness about painting’s claim to spirituality and theatricality; the irony is that he basks in them, nonetheless.

In the end, Graham’s faith in the metaphysics of painting is most probably misplaced. But in this age of galloping skepticism, that faith provides us with a necessary--if not necessarily (or even hopefully) definitive--countertext.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.