ART REVIEWS : Unraveling a Mystery at Thomas Solomon’s Garage

Painted, scarred, smudged, webbed, stained, cracked, burned and wax-dripped plaster “sections” fit together like a chain of vertebrae, concave depression locking into convex swell, forming a column as impressive as one by Brancusi. Later, they are laid out along the floor horizontally.

Eight “paintings” made of glass and wood, canvas and paper, rubber and wire, lean against the wall. Earlier, they had been turned around to the other side. Tomorrow, they will be stacked into a sleek wedge.

The art of Emil Lukas at Thomas Solomon’s Garage feels something like peeling an onion, digging up layers of sedimentary rock, trekking across a landscape, or unraveling a mystery.

Or, it feels entirely different, for the answer--if it exists--is not lodged in the center, buried at the bottom or waiting at the end. It is wrapped around and tangled into the very process of movement.

Post-minimal and Process art of the 1970s--which stressed the subjective, the shifting and the sensuous over Minimalism’s insistence upon objectivity, permanence and geometry--provides an art historical context for Lukas’ startling new work. He subverts his art’s monumental tendencies in the manner of Robert Morris’ early sculpture, while his aggressively visceral materials recall those of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse.

Yet it is ultimately more useful to consider Lukas’ art within a different context--that of reading. Certainly, Lukas sets us up for it: “Linkage” unfolds like a book, its thin planks of wood designed to turn like pages; the 93 drawings of the diminutive “Passage to Dusk” resemble nothing so much as bookmarks, cut to trace the passage of time, space, distance and narrative.

However, the work is informed by a specific notion of reading, one resistant to the confines of traditional narrative linearity. It is a notion, in Roland Barthes’ terms, of the work as text: open, inexhaustible, indeterminate--a field that takes shape only in the process of being read/rewritten.

This vision of reading as writing erases the stolidly hierarchical distinctions between sender and receiver, artist and non-artist. Through it, Lukas offers us a textual body of art that is not only radiant and intelligent, but profoundly generous, as well.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Sunday.

Too Soon Old: A young girl bedecked in ballet slippers and a tulle collar studded with paper flowers grabs onto a leafy vine and pulls it across her thin body, as if to shield herself from those who would too closely admire her beauty. At the bottom of a darkened staircase, a disconsolate girl sits with head in hands, while another stands above her stoic and watchful, barely visible but for the frame of her eyeglasses.

The children in Andrea Modica’s cool black-and-white photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery are not smiling. Neither are they laughing, running, leaping or playing. Angry or contemplative, calm or worried, they look like the adults they will too soon become.

For the last five years, Modica has photographed these children--all members of one family of 14--following them from condemned house to condemned house, from one community to another in Upstate New York. Like the most interesting documentary photographs of the last 20 years (Danny Lyon, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark), what Modica’s images record--as much as the members of this nomadic family--is her own strangely bifurcated role within their lives.

“Treadwell, N.Y.” (1986) emblematizes Modica’s status as both intimate and alien--an inextricable element of her subjects’ reality--as well as the off-stage creator of it. Here, two children are held in the arms of a pair of unseen women. The boy stares off into the distance from under a set of deeply furrowed brows; the girl clutches her heart in a gesture that is heartbreakingly mature.

Modica’s proximity to this very private scene evinces an astonishing trust between photographer and subject. Yet the syncopated rhythms of everyone’s hands insist that this is, above all, a balletic composition. There is truth here, then, but it is filtered through the scrim of beauty. And so, in the end, the scene is trapped under glass, sealed within the crystalline world of the platinum print.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033 , through Tuesday. Closed Sunday and Monday .