ART REVIEWS : Gormley’s Sculptures Get Physical

A respect for metaphysics is rarely seen in the visual arts, especially since Postmodernism’s critical impulse displaced Modernism’s drive toward authenticity. Antony Gormley’s three sculptures at Burnett Miller Gallery bring this esoteric branch of philosophy back to art by bringing it down to Earth.

His raw iron works, cast in the shape of his own body, make physical the sense that whatever defines us as humans cannot wholly be accounted for by bodily existence. Without floating off into otherworldly spirituality, Gormley’s insistently tangible sculptures quietly demonstrate that whatever distinguishes people from objects is intangible and invisible, yet essential.

One figure, titled “Lever,” defies gravity but doesn’t escape its force. With feet firmly planted on the gallery wall about 18 inches above the concrete floor, Gormley’s anonymous man leans out at a 45-degree angle, so that its head hovers just above the viewer’s. “Offering” lies on its back with its legs, head and arms raised slightly off the ground. Sections of its chest, stomach and thighs have been flattened, as if pressed down by the immense weight of the world. The third figure, “Word Made Flesh,” rests on a head tucked tightly between its knees, as if it were about to be born.

Strength and vulnerability intermingle in the 42-year-old British sculptor’s figures. Despite being made from thick, rusty iron shells with welded seams plainly visible, each of Gormley’s weighty pieces seems animated by something like consciousness. Moments of extreme concentration, meditative focus, and total self-absorption endow his hollow metal bodies with the sense that they have withdrawn from their surroundings to completely give themselves over to their singular activities. Their presence charges the bunkerlike gallery with a palpable tension, as if each viewer threatens to shatter the concentration of the inanimate figures--to diminish their intensity and reduce them to mere things.

Since the mid-’80s, Gormley has focused on the human form, usually using sheets of soldered lead to create hauntingly solemn, memorial-like sculptures. Their softly seductive, elegant metal skins suggested that their withdrawn serenity or exquisite solitude bordered on the absolute stillness of death. More majestic and monumental than his newest work, his lead figures embodied a sense of profound melancholy. Almost too beautiful, they had the unapproachable aura of inhuman icons, sometimes angelic but often pagan.

Next to his lead works, Gormley’s iron sculptures look unheroic and matter-of-fact, as if they fully belong to the everyday world of ordinary activities. A no-nonsense directness gives them a hands-on immediacy. Their unceremonial material carries working-class associations. Their postures also signify a shift in Gormley’s attention, from an exploration of self-absorption in meditation, to self-absorption in the concentration that accompanies immense efforts and physical labor.

The loss of self put forth by these powerful pieces is simultaneously mundane and extraordinary. Gormley continues to demonstrate that he is one of the most important sculptors of his generation.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757, through Nov . 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Geometric Abstraction: A typical painting by Peter Halley consists of an off-center square of the bumpy stuff sprayed on motel ceilings, and a dozen or more L-shaped bands that frame this empty field and lead off in three directions. The three new, approximately 8-foot-square canvases at Michael Kohn Gallery hit you first with the bold colors of their simple, rearrangeable elements. Lines of pale blue sit tensely next to segments of Day-Glo orange; a fat burgundy band battles with a thin strip of fleshy pink; and vibrant lemon-yellows, lime-greens, and fire-engine reds clash with soft pastels, industrial grays, flat black and pure white.

Halley builds dissonant, optical overloads at the edges of his paintings in order to contrast their aggressive dynamism to the clunky impassivity of the monochrome squares at the centers of his images. These central fields have the presence of stucco walls or cottage cheese ceilings. Like nothingness itself, they seem to suck the light out of the room. Despite their bright colors, they look heavy and dead. Intentionally foreign to the illusionistic space of traditional abstract painting, they belong to the banal world of strip malls, prefab office buildings and generic institutions.

Halley’s newest Pop paintings welcome these references to the alienating spaces of the contemporary urban environment. Over the past decade, the New York-based artist has made images based on cells--both those of prisons and batteries--and on the conduits of computer circuits and plumbing. His earlier work diagramed the connections between dizzying social networks and mind-numbing post-industrial mechanization. Powerfully claustrophobic, it displayed the Modern collapse of free movement--total entrapment.

Although Halley’s earlier work became famous for fusing abstraction and representation, what it really did was treat abstract painting as a pure sign, no different from the immediately recognizable symbols in international airports. His punch pictures supposedly put “content” back into geometric “form,” but paid a steep price for achieving this end. The problem was that they failed to recognize that content is not a “thing” that can be deposited in the empty vessel of form. Halley’s diagrams assumed that geometric abstraction was nothing but an arbitrary sign into which he could insert any agenda.

In contrast, the images Halley has made over the past 18 months or so are less illustrative, static, or dumbly literal. They function not as signs, but as paintings. The difference is slight but decisive. Halley’s new work is less concerned with conveying abstract ideas than with engineering visual experiences that only later can be translated into thoughts, put into words and communicated. The difference is between reference and illusion: the first activity takes place in your brain, the second in your eyeballs.

The result is an engaging, accessible and highly charged body of work that includes some of the best paintings Halley has made. His masterful calibrations of color make Day-Glo look as fresh as it must have been when it first appeared in the 1960s. His odd combinations don’t jar your eyes as much as they create a strange inconsistency in peripheral vision, one that feels fluid as it echoes and resonates across the blank expanses at the centers of his images.

Halley’s art no longer sells painting short to illustrate preconceived ideas, nor does it rehash formalist cliches about purity and autonomy. Instead, it plays geometric abstraction against Pop art with originality and verve. His latest paintings represent one of the liveliest strands of Pop Modernism, a tendency in contemporary image-making that may not be a movement, but describes a lot of what is going on.

* Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-7713, through Oct . 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Crossing Abstract Lines: Four small figurative paintings from 1919 and 10 larger abstractions from 1964-77 provide a striking contrast in Lorser Feitelson’s (1898-1978) use of line throughout his career. Curated by Josine Ianco-Starrels, this compact and instructive exhibition at Tobey C. Moss Gallery proposes that the emphatic, sensuous contours in his pictures of fruits, bathers, nudes and swans are preserved in the sinuous, flowing lines that shoot, bend, twist and flow across the flat, monochromatic fields of his late paintings.

Ianco-Starrels’ century-spanning juxtaposition is right to emphasize that swift motion and easy fluidity define the lines in both bodies of this early L.A. Modernist’s work. Claiming that his representational paintings hold, in incipient form, the key to his mature abstractions, however, too greatly downplays the differences between these paintings.

The movement implied by Feitelson’s early, figurative pictures is the kind that caresses, runs over, and sometimes embraces the contours and protrusion of tangible, physical forms, usually those associated with the solidity and fullness of the human body. The movement traced in his late paintings is more abstract: It doesn’t define the edges of graspable volumes, but races across imaginary spaces--two-dimensional fields accessible to sight alone.

By emphasizing the similarities between these two very different kinds of line, this exhibition repeats the standard Modernist argument that painting advanced throughout the century by eschewing representation and pursuing the pure pleasures of its unadulterated formal elements. Rather than inserting Feitelson’s art into this hackneyed story, it would be more interesting to think about his lines in relation to aerial views of freeway exchanges and the tapering curves that underline the logos on Coca-Cola bottles.

His palette of hot, synthetic colors, and cool, almost mechanistic paint application invite this Pop-oriented interpretation. This revision also suggests that Feitelson’s abstractions do not have a more prominent position in conventional Modernist histories because his paintings don’t fit into their rigid, non-referential hierarchies.

* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-5523, through Oct. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Fragile Entities: The makeup and breakdown of groups comes under study in Rory Devine’s first solo exhibition. With varying degrees of success, his paintings, drawings, collages and installations at Earl McGrath Gallery suggest that groups are fragile entities, momentarily held together for frighteningly arbitrary reasons, and always susceptible to rearrangement.

Devine’s most compelling pieces are those in which he runs a maze of electrical cords around a grid of nails that cover the wall. In one, six bright light bulbs create literal blind spots in his 3-D “drawing.” Some of the shadows they cast seem more substantial than the cords. Titled “Myths of the Near Future,” his schematic map makes concrete a schizophrenic sense of unity, one in which a single current tenuously and invisibly holds a complex constellation together.

Devine’s works on paper and canvas more awkwardly articulate similar ideas. The largest consists of 100 small collages he mailed to as many people. As each person returns a piece of the puzzle to the gallery, a grid fills in with a particularly fragmented image. What takes shape is an astute and coherent depiction of group dynamics. Devine’s art demonstrates that groups are not static collections of things, but force fields maintained by flexible relationships.

* Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (213) 652-9850, through Oct. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.