Artist Splinters Space and Time : Sculpture: Young Basque’s wall pieces range from whimsical to fearful.

Now that slashed canvases, blank canvases, machine-made cubes, a stretch of silence and a fish tank full of basketballs have all been embraced into the canon of recent art history, it’s hard to label any art irreverent anymore. Andres Nagel, a young artist from San Sebastian in the Basque country of Spain, relishes the role of renegade, however, and his current show at the Tasende Gallery goes by the name “An Irreverent Approach.”

Indeed, Nagel’s art has a rambunctious, rebellious spirit. It toys with formal conventions by scrambling the codes of painting and sculpture. It dabbles in the deeply visceral domain of myth, then turns around to sing the praises of the jumbo jet. If it commits violations against traditional genres and subjects, it does so with the authority of countless artists who have wrestled successfully with those rules already.

Touches of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and others emerge throughout the 21 recent wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures in this show, all made of fiberglass sheathed in polyester and painted skittishly in oil. A Pop sensibility bubbles to the surface in Nagel’s cartoonish figures, his embrace of mundane souvenirs of mass culture and his practice of treating those objects and images as icons.

A sculpted, life-size bull painted searing green and yellow becomes a walking billboard for Schweppes drinks, for example. And the three-armed “Lady With Tutti Frutti Hat” has painted targets for breasts and a bristly scrub brush for hair.

Nagel’s most exuberant adventures are with space itself and the once-sanctified picture plane. As if hand grenades had been hurled at that traditionally smooth, continuous surface, Nagel’s wall sculptures reverberate with the shock of disruption. They are frozen conglomerates of shattered planes, fragmented, angled, dynamic.

In “They Made Me a Verdi,” the fist of a red, raw-skulled boxer breaks his opponent--and the entire image--into pieces. His punch cracks the fiberglass planes, which appear suspended in tilted disarray. The fallen boxer not only bends but breaks at the waist and the neck. A blue shadow echoes his falling body, and a more complete silhouette lies on the floor in anticipation of the fallen figure.

Not only space but time, too, is splintered here as Nagel shows several still frames from one continuous action. The effect is filmic, and a vivid, playful update on the 19th-Century photographic studies that first captured sequential motions in a single frame.

Nagel’s image of a tiger leaping through space exploits the same stopped-action effect: the front half of the animal appears to be landing over a patch of knotted raffia, while the back half is still stretched in mid-flight. In another animal study, the immense horizontal “Metaphysical Box XXXVII (3rd Part),” lions pad slowly through a Cubo-Futurist cage of faceted bars and planes.

This is Nagel at his wittiest, drawing from several visual vocabularies at once to construct vibrant explorations of time and space. He has a darker side, too, and more than a whiff of personal and political cynicism drifts through this show. The wall work, “Even God Loves America II,” shows a giant head, grimacing through an explosive attack.

“The Artist’s Sadness Reduced to Merchandise,” also a wall-mounted work, feels slightly confessional, an admission of the ironic, perverse nature of Nagel’s expressive enterprise--making art, and a living, out of his own Angst . Nagel visualizes this phenomenon as a giant skull whose jagged teeth clamp a cigarette. Its black plume winds its way upward, past the hollow, silver-edged cavity meant for eyes, and nearly up to the top of the head, which is crowned in a coral halo.

This unsettling image of death feeding on itself is among the show’s strongest statements. Equally haunting is Nagel’s wall sculpture of Saturn, the mythical god said to have eaten his own children. Here, one small boy who has already lost an arm seems to plead with his father, who is busy gnawing at another child. There is a straightforward morbidity to the image that is truly disarming.

Nagel is at his best when approaching these most pungent of subjects, for here his discontinuous planes are not just formal devices but actual evidence of the senseless, violent chaos he addresses.

* Tasende Gallery, 820 Prospect St., La Jolla, through Sept. 19. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 6.

ART NOTES

Local painter Greg Reser was recently awarded a Western States Arts Federation/NEA Regional Fellowship. Twenty artists were selected from more than 2,100 applicants to receive the $5,000 awards. . . .

Cincinnati Artists’ Group Effort is currently hosting an installation by San Diego environmental artist Mario Lara. His work, “Public Trust,” is intended to raise issues of public accountability, censorship and freedom of expression.