ART REVIEWS : James Richards’ Peculiar Illusionism

The four new paintings in James Richards’ first solo show at the Food House look like webs spun by spiders with no sense of direction. Or, tennis rackets strung by a machine too out of whack to line up the strings in a grid. Or, handcrafted fabrics that can’t be used because too many of their strands have been wrapped around the frame of the loom.

Although Richards’ mutant constructions invite these non-art comparisons and all of the free associations that accompany them, his strangely three-dimensional objects compellingly take up many of the issues essential to purely abstract painting. With originality, elan and a playfully awkward elegance, they scrutinize the relationships among a painting’s surface, its support and framing edges.

Like a number of other young artists interested in expanding the vocabulary of abstraction, Richards turns this once resolutely formal art inside-out. His funny, physically engaging work rewrites recent art history by demonstrating that the power of abstract painting does not lie in its outright refusal of representation. Instead, its vitality is shown to reside in its capacity to create a peculiar kind of illusionism.

Each of Richards’ paintings employs a readily identifiable inventory of materials: one or two widths of white, pink or yellow nylon string, a stained or raw wooden frame, ordinary metal staples and monochromatic blotches of oil paint. They commingle to form strange illusions, ones that cannot be traced back to any of the materials that make up the painting.

Richards wraps and weaves the nylon string around wooden rectangles to form complex entanglements of lines. On these criss-crossing networks he suspends randomly shaped blobs of black and white paint. He also paints the interior edges of the wood, casting colorfully immaterial reflections on the part of the gallery wall circumscribed by the frame.

The strings’ shadows, which cut across the delicate, reflected colors, often appear to be more substantial than the elements from which they originate. They effectively push the non-representational splotches of paint into the viewer’s space, as if the paint belonged more to the world of substances than to that of illusions.

The strings also usurp drawing’s conventional function. By defining boundaries that follow the irregular, geometric contours of the paint, the strings remove the artist’s hand from the composition. Floating between the wall and the viewer, the paint looks like stylized, synthetic cowhide. Both inhuman and deliberate, its presence is simultaneously animal and mechanical. Mysteriously intangible yet materially present, it escapes the boring ordinariness of the real world.

In Richards’ art, the picture plane no longer contains pictorial incidents. Instead, it is the conceptual locus around which the painting and the viewer move, in a reciprocal dance. The choreography is both visual and physical, intellectually challenging and bodily satisfying.

Without nostalgia, the viewer returns to the late 1960s, when formalist abstraction enjoyed its heyday--and met its end. Richards’ work demonstrates that equating abstraction with transcendence is not intrinsic to painting, but is rather the invention of critics uncomfortable with an elusive, unknowable world occupied by real bodies and minds.

Food House, 2220 Colorado Blvd., Building 4, 402, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030, through Saturday.

Big Sensations: “The New Physical Abstraction in Los Angeles” is a monster of an exhibition. It brings together more pounds of paint and square feet of canvas than has ever, to my knowledge, been exhibited in an L.A. gallery.

But big paintings don’t necessarily translate into big ideas. In fact, since the heroics and histrionics of Abstract Expressionism, and the architectural presence of Minimalism, bigness itself has come to symbolize artistic arrogance and unbridled egotism.

The mural-scale paintings by the eight, L.A.-based artists in this ambitious show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions demonstrate the falsity of equating size and bombast. Like everything else in art, bigness doesn’t always mean the same thing. It can be used, as it is here, to create meditative environments, theatrical backdrops, humorous mutations and, above all, overwhelming sensations.

To its credit, “The New Physical Abstraction” charts the points of intersection and divergence among a loosely knit group. United by their desire to emphasize the priority of bodily experience, they are divided by disparate beliefs in what these physical sensations mean. Their work runs the gamut from splashy to restrained. They shift between aggressive immediacy and slow nuance, always playing the messiness of experience against the coherence of conceptual categories.

Two historical strands are juxtaposed, but not woven together, in the show. Gestural abstraction and monochromatic Minimalism define the poles between which these painters energetically maneuver. Unlike their forebears from the 1950s and ‘60s, who defined their work in opposition to one another, the L.A. painters don’t oppose gesture to geometry, or free-flowing spontaneity to cerebral rigor. In a Postmodern mix, they intermingle positions that had been antithetical.

James Hayward and Wess Dahlberg stand out for their capacity to suffuse the space of monochrome painting with the immediate visual punch of gestural abstraction. Lush, sumptuous and materially resplendent, the thick surfaces of their paintings are also distant, frozen and exquisitely artificial. Their synthetic swathes of color and iridescent grids of creamy pigment engineer an otherworldly kick that is as beautiful as it is unnatural.

John Millei, David Amico and Roger Herman respectively deploy photography, collage and art historical referents to insert ironic distance into their painterly pictures of fragmentation and rearrangement. Simultaneously romantic and mannerist, they use the techniques of mechanical reproduction to purge abstraction of its spiritual residue.

Millei’s white painting, from his otherwise black “Matador” series, casts transcendence as the immaterial reflection of an oversize vanity mirror. Amico’s cacophonous collisions of printing and painting double the dissonance of either art, almost to a schizophrenic pitch. And Herman’s new “Cobalt” series figuratively puts the viewer in the picture, as if one were looking out from under the surface of Monet’s famous lily-pad-filled ponds, sensuously drenched in liquidity and light.

Mary Corse’s planes of reflective pigment and Charles Fine’s icy panels of wax deploy “authentic” gesture more as a ghost or buried memory. In both, the singular touch of the artist is barely visible beneath layers of sign-paint or sediments of encaustic. Its trace inflects and softens otherwise austere, impersonal forms.

In Lawrence Carroll’s weighty constructions, the hand of the artist disappears for that of the craftsman. Like coffins for paintings, his work manifests the exhibition’s exploration of the overlap between painterly gesture and static object.

Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., second floor, (213) 935-4411, through Oct. 31. Closed Mondays.

The Doctor’s In: The Rosamund Felsen Gallery is closed for the month of August. In its place, critic and curator Ralph Rugoff has opened the “Rosamund Felsen Clinic & Recovery Center.” His tongue-in-cheek critique of art-as-addiction and artist-as-therapist includes a small waiting room, a cheery receptionist, an analyst’s couch, an out-of-town artist who phones in advice, creative exercises for patients to work out their problems and several examples of these therapeutic crafts.

Upon arrival, you’re asked to fill out a questionnaire meant to assess the level of your addiction. Then an attendant (or, the Chief of Staff himself) parts a curtain and escorts you into the “clinic.” Here, you are allowed to roam among ugly installations, flat-footed objects, demented drawings and an out-of-place painting, all made by well-known and less-recognized artists.

Their sarcastic works are, on one level, funny. On another, they are deeply serious. They deflate the pretentiousness of galleries and ridicule the notion that art might be transcendent. Rugoff’s “clinic” mocks the idea that aesthetics are based in morality--that art has the potential to heal ills, improve conditions or even offer solace for pain. Nevertheless, his project seeks to improve its “patients,” if only by preaching that art’s transformative power is a lie.

As a work of art itself, the “clinic” runs into problems beyond this contradiction. The version of art it attacks is an out-dated cliche, one that hasn’t really been taken seriously since the 19th Century, before the advent of Modernism, Dada and Pop. Rugoff’s anti-art gesture hides its bad faith behind fraudulent populism. It equates expertise with elitism, and then dismisses both as mysticism.

Lurking just below the surface of Rugoff’s over-simplification of art is his equally fallacious idealization of life--a supposedly artless realm defined by the ostensibly unproblematic notions of health, honesty and unalienated behavior. Both life and art are more complicated--and entwined--than this exhibition allows.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Light in Landscapes: Jane Wilson’s landscape paintings depict the earth, sea and sky, but their real subject is light. Shimmering across, filtering through, washing over or glaring out of, the light in her paintings at Earl McGrath Gallery is as animated and adaptable as it is intangible.

The 68-year-old artist bases her paintings on direct experience and faithful observation. Nonetheless, their light has the presence of a mystical, otherworldly force. Wilson’s art illuminates the fact that the path toward beauty and transcendence does not lead us out of the world, but more deeply into it.

She paints light as if Impressionism was a detour better avoided than followed. Rather than filling the distance between things with brush-loaded strokes and contrasting globs of paint, she combines the pure ethereality of pre-Modern, Northern Renaissance light with a typically American approach to landscape--one that knows the power of giving sheer emptiness its due.

Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N . Robertson Blvd., (310) 652-9850, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.