ART REVIEWS : Spiritual Vistas Come With Pitfalls

At different moments, Darren Waterston’s oil-on-wood landscapes at Jan Baum Gallery conjure Chinese hanging scrollsM .W. Turner’s whirlpools of light and color, microscopic images of translucent globules hovering in a thickly atmospheric space, and the lurid, Technicolor sunsets of 1950s B-movies.

Neither scattershot nor illustrative of Postmodernism’s predilection for pastiche, the eclecticism of these richly luminous paintings--some wall-size, others as small and intimate as Renaissance devotional icons--represents an unsated yearning toward a spiritual state, somewhere outside the images’ materiality, and somewhere outside our own.

Landscape, however tenuously defined--a wispy tree, a feathered ridge, a burst of light over a darkened horizon line--becomes the privileged motif, both a symbol of flight and a vehicle of transport to another realm. Landscape as a metaphor for metaphysical retreat is certainly nothing new; neither does Waterston claim it to be. What is different here is the technical proficiency with which the artist orchestrates that retreat. So polished, so intricate and so seductive are his surfaces--built up from coats of gesso, oil paint and acidic glazes, buffed and rubbed and coated with layers of creamy wax--that they seem at once inevitable and inexhaustible.

Waterston is not yet 30 and tendencies toward preciosity and precocity still hang ominously over his work. The paintings are often simply too pretty--and the spiritual ought to be neither simple nor pretty. Waterston is well aware of this pitfall, interrupting his lambent, pictorial reveries with small, crimson scars or milky, calligraphic flourishes. Yet such quick fixes scarcely address the larger contradictions at play.

Waterston’s work is additionally weighed down by the profusion of references and influences mentioned above, ranging from the Yuan dynasty-style mountains and the Sanskrit words that appear as titles (“Sutratma,” a Hindu concept relating to the sacred thread of life, and “Atma,” which refers to the soul) to the multiple allusions to Turner’s eddying vistas, Friedrich’s Christianized forests and Church’s heroically scaled valleys.

The diversity and high seriousness of these sources suggest Waterston’s considerable ambitions. But the amalgamation of East and West sits rather uncomfortably here. In any case, reconciling the Western tradition of personal expression with the Eastern penchant for subjugating individual vision is a quixotic goal at best. Waterston’s development as an artist is predicated upon his willingness to make difficult choices--between self-expression and self-abnegation, between beauty and truth. One hopes that indecision will not hold him back from the achievements this (literally) glowing body of work augurs.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Saturday.

A Tenuous Web: “The Transformation of Myth Through Time” is the unapologetically grandiloquent title Mark Heresy has given to a cavalcade of drawings and mixed-media sculptures based upon that web-spinning, wall-climbing champion of justice, Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man.

As the by-now epochal story has it, all it took was a bite from a radioactive spider to transform science nerd Peter Parker into a superhero with great strength, a taste for danger, and enough “spider-sense” to ensure his invincibility. As Heresy would have it, it doesn’t take much more than a fantasy as potent as this one to make art.

Potency is indeed at issue here, for several of Heresy’s screaming red-and-blue drawings at Parker/Mark Gallery proclaim that the web Spider-Man tirelessly shoots from his hand is a metaphor for ejaculation--thus his great appeal for the insecure teen-age boy. Spider-Man’s great appeal for Heresy may well be the fact that Spider-Man was the first superhero to be plagued by personal problems--problems paying his rent, with his girlfriends, and with his loyal Aunt Mae.

Yet Heresy’s reasons for selecting Spider-Man as the locus of his inquiry into the nature of hero-worship, the mechanisms of mass-media fantasy and the cult of the Uber-Mensch--over Superman, Batman and a host of others--remain almost entirely obscure. More crucial is the recurrent, seemingly unquenchable theme of potency, which here transmutes itself from a parable of male adolescence into a sharp indictment of the Promethean artist-genius--endowed with inexhaustible energy, wit and cunning.

So our insect-hero “disguises” himself, in a rapid succession of drawings, as a fanciful image by Miro; a color field painting (red and blue, of course) by Ellsworth Kelly; a “papier-collee” by Picasso; and a lumpen Henry Moore sculpture, “to escape his arch enemy, the post-modern crisis,” as the accompanying text proclaims.

He becomes Rodin’s “Thinker,” his costume painted directly onto a small, white plaster cast of the introspective figure, and American Indian totem, covered with a complex pattern of interlocking arachnids.

It’s an inventive scheme, but in the end rather thin, especially if one starts to compare Heresy’s work with that of a slew of younger artists--Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Raymond Pettibon most prominent among them--who have engaged in a far more sophisticated manner with the particular vernacular and cosmogony of the comic book universe. In particular, the gleeful superabundance of material presented here suggests that Heresy is not sufficiently distanced from the myth of potency he is ostensibly interrogating. As Spider-Man/Peter Parker learned at his peril, with great powers come great responsibilities. Heresy has a bit more work to do before he lives up to his own--both powers and responsibilities, that is.

* Parker/Mark Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 936-9022, through Saturday.

Enigmatic Fabrications: In Jo Ann Callis’ most recent suite of Cibachrome photographs at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, luscious, crescent-shaped folds of champagne-colored satin, looping, plunging and dragging yards of ice-blue silk, and neurotically wound bolts of gray-green fabric are liberated from their subordinate roles and thrust into what is quite literally the spotlight.

There, under the concentrated glare of hot lights and between the darkened shadows, these pieces of cloth become the unlikely protagonists of a series of relentlessly un-still lives.

Callis’ forms are anthropomorphized: an elaborately wrapped, bunched and bowed confection of red fabric conjures a pregnant queen; pieces of gracefully gathered and tucked white satin, set against a backdrop of deep blue, resemble an ascending angel.

Certainly, there is something surreal at play here, to the extent that several of the photographs recall Man Ray’s cloth and rope-tied “enigmas.”

But unlike Man Ray, Callis is uninterested in knowing precisely what lies underneath. Her logic is closer to that of the striptease, wherein we long for what is concealed even before it begins to reveal itself. Callis’ pictures hint at recognizable forms, but stop short of insisting upon them. Preferring to revel in the color, beauty and mystery of the surface, they proclaim that the “truth” of appearances is irrelevant.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-0222, through July 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Photographs and Mysteries: One hand clasps another. Two hands reach out to grasp a pair of shoulders, which turn in the other direction. Nothing of greater import occurs in Christina Fernandez’s small, black-and-white photographs. Yet the images are unexpectedly important, bearing upon the difficulty of human contact, the miscalculations, disappointments and mysteries embedded in a single gesture.

Fernandez’s gelatin silver prints at Daniel Saxon Gallery are presented as negatives--blacks printed as whites, light printed as darkness. Such a reversal betrays a desire to penetrate through to the other side, to X-ray the ordinary and find the extraordinary lurking within. So, too, does it hint at the pull of memory, as the images are drawn back, prior to their translation into a photographic language that promises to tell the truth, but instead limits, fixes and codifies experience, obscuring it entirely in the process.

Fernandez’s art engages with Postmodernism’s critique of the photograph’s claim to authenticity. But her position is less ironic than melancholic. Rather than smug satisfaction, Fernandez’s work evinces great sorrow--not merely at the futility of our relations with one another, but at the unfixing of truth and the unhinging of meaning that define the postmodern condition. Thus the drops of water spilling through a woman’s clasped hands in one of the photographic negatives--clear liquid rendered as thick as tears and as dark as blood.

This latter image, titled “Cuidado Amada,” is one of four larger works in the show, all of which combine photography with collage. Here, a woman in a sleeveless dress, her head neatly sliced off by the top of the frame, is placed within a shallow box-like frame and surrounded by shards of glass, all painted black. In another photo-collage, a couple embraces in ecstasy or in the throes of death, blackened clusters of dried rose stems enframing them.

The theatricality of these works is unmistakable; so, too, is their stab at monumentality. But what they verge upon instead is the histrionic, their restrained palette of black, white and gray notwithstanding. Monumentality is not a matter of size and dramatic incident but is more often a matter of balancing simplicity against that which is unsayable.

* Daniel Saxon Gallery, 7525 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-5282, through July 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.