ART REVIEWS : Doolin Tweaks L.A. With Gentle, Foreboding Twist

The Southwest has always based its myth on the idea of milk and honey oases like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Maybe that’s why certain kinds of haunted, troubled art have not played well here. It’s as if we don’t want to be reminded that our pleasure domes rest in the midst of forbidding desert. Now the news is that Lotusland’s fabled economic buoyancy may have sprung a terminal leak. Such intimations of gloom down the road lend a different twist to the work of an artist like James Doolin.

Doolin, 60, is an L.A. painter par excellence. He first came to note in the late ‘70s after spending four years on a single picture, a bird’s-eye view of the Santa Monica Mall. It’s an amazing technical tour de force that also manages to speak of a paradoxical town where people feel isolated amid teeming life. When first shown it seemed like a fascinating oddity. Today it seems pertinent.

In his first local exhibition in five years, Doolin presents 45 paintings. That it includes several as large as “Shopping Mall” suggests that Doolin has relaxed his technique if not his intensity.

He joins a significant number of artists who seem to be trying to make sense of the present by returning to the past. His views of Los Angeles look like ‘90s cityscapes viewed from the Depression decade of the ‘30s. “Stairway” shows a panoramic Santa Monica sunset and focuses on a guy out with his dog jogging up a concrete staircase. It loops into deep distance crossing a bridge arching over the freeway to the beach. A dusky chill blows off the water. Exaggerated space creates a vacuum of surreal anxiety.

In a freeway scene the road rushes backward to the distant downtown skyline. It’s crossed by a woozily tipped overpass and a deserted bridge that meanders off in no particular direction. There are no people, just cars proceeding with purposeful blindness. The title is significant. It’s called “East Wind.” Palm trees are whipped about with a hurricane-force intensity one expects in Florida or Cape Cod, much stronger than L.A.’s Santa Anas.

All of this could be written off to Doolin’s own background. Born in Connecticut and trained in Philadelphia and New York, he’s old enough to have inherited influence from artists like Thomas Hart Benton or Paul Cadmus.

Some of their jeering satire and compulsive technique roosts in Doolin’s art. But because he is a softer and more sophisticated painter, the work seems like a gentle guy’s reaction to an ominous situation. “Another Sunday in the Park” finds him mindful of Seurat’s masterpiece. Doolin turns it into a Regionalist jape in the foreground but figures in the middle distance--especially a graceful black roller-skater--have a gentle volumetric completeness worthy of the French master.

Doolin goes over the top in a couple of Las Vegas paintings. “Casino Zombies” looks like a record of George Tooker’s faceless civil servants on joyless holiday. Although visually interesting and thematically indisputable, they seem redundant. Nobody needs a satire of that vulgar Xanadu.

Nonetheless the show is well worth seeing for anyone sensing L.A.’s darkened foreboding mood or who just enjoys the kind of painterly mastery that shows up in Doolin’s numerous small cityscapes.

Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (213) 319-9956. Ends Saturday .