ART REVIEW : Snapshots of Banality Point to Advertising

At Boritzer/Gray Gallery, photographer Ken Botto uses children’s playthings to fabricate miniature scenes of the mindlessness served up by advertising. His color prints of Barbie dolls and toy cars, model houses and kitsch statuettes depict a world overrun by banality.

In “The Strip,” garish toy billboards advertise fake Holiday Inns and McDonald’s. An awkward ceramic copy of an armless Greek statue and a dashboard version of Jesus tower over an overcrowded, trash-filled street, competing for the attention and money of the doubly dwarfed consumer. In “Sunday Afternoon,” plastic dolls in ‘50s fashions stroll on a littered street before grimy model buildings, one of which displays a mural based on Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting of the Parisian bourgeoisie trying to relax on the grassy banks of a river.

Botto is right to align his mean-spirited photographs with Seurat’s masterpieces. The 19th-Century painting reveals middle-class pleasures beginning to dissipate into isolation and anomie. Seurat invented pointillism as a symbol of this cultural breakdown: The people in his image seem isolated and silent, more like toys going through motions than individuals enjoying a pleasant afternoon. The park in his painting is downstream of a factory that daily dumped sewage into the river.

Botto is wrong, however, to imagine that his photographs tell us anything new about the emptiness of modern life. Where Seurat’s painting gave form to an emerging reality, Botto’s photographs return to an outdated idea about the evils of consumerism. Their finger-pointing moralism oversimplifies problems that have been with us since the camera’s invention. Boritzer/Gray Gallery, 903 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-6652, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.