ART REVIEWS

The Politics of Pleasure: If a monochrome painting is the Modernist artwork par excellence--a mystical space of meditation, framing the contemplative viewer and the artist-genius who speaks through his divinely inspired creation--then Mary Beyt’s monochrome paintings offer a Post-modernist corrective, subverting that ideology and more.

Before anything else, however, Beyt’s paintings are exquisite. That is, of course, part of the plan, for what is under scrutiny in her debut at L.A. Louver Gallery is the politics of pleasure.

The New York-based artist begins with a monochromatically tinted canvas, upon which she lays commercially manufactured lace that has been soaked in white paint. Once the lace has been peeled off, the hazy after-image that remains becomes the image’s substructure, the base on which is built a densely pigmented, luminous surface (hot pink, deep purple, lime green) that retains the all-over pattern of the lace.

Beyt asks a question: When does a work of art cease to be serious and become decorative, ornamental, a pleasure and nothing more?

Unlike those of her Modernist predecessors who stressed the spiritual rather than the aesthetic aspects of their work, her large Color-field paintings assert that decoration, ornamentation and pleasure are not anathema to serious art. They do so by coaxing us to recognize the extent to which we associate those qualities with femininity, thereby arming ourselves to dismiss them.

Beyt’s paintings are marked by “the woman’s touch.” This works not as a demeaning label, but as part of a larger deconstructive strategy, which calls into question the recalcitrant hierarchy that values masculine over feminine, “high” art over “low.”

Beyt joins an expanding group of younger artists (Mary Brogger and Sabina Ott among them) who are involved in critiques of Modernism’s construction of pleasure and femininity. Though her work is perhaps not yet as fully developed as theirs--where she will go from here is by no means apparent--this is a most impressive West Coast debut. L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.