ART REVIEWS : Charm, Trauma Mix in Wesley Works

In John Wesley’s crisply uncanny paintings from the past 30 years, a common box of Kleenex is simultaneously an innocuous piece of consumerist packaging and the background for an afternoon sail at the edge of the world. With an extreme economy of means, and a brilliant sense of the eye-grabbing power of two-dimensional shape, the 64-year-old, Los Angeles-born and New York-based painter deftly marries cartoons and epiphanies.

Humor has the upper hand in Wesley’s 32 modestly scaled paintings at Daniel Weinberg Gallery. “Golden Horde,” from 1966, depicts a chorus line of camels with their chins held high. Their bulbous humps overlap, forming a pattern that simultaneously conjures forbidden sex and distances us from its threat. The camels’ hind legs end in a candy-colored rainbow of panty hose and garter belts, putting a campy spin on the dumb beast used as the macho logo for a popular brand of cigarettes.

Throughout the ‘70s, Wesley continued his loving dissection of ambiguity and double meaning. On the domestic front, gray babies rain from the sky to be caught by a hapless youth. A gleeful daughter, in “Daddy’s Home,” gets repeated five times so that her uncontrollable delight looks like a demonic grimace, one that turns dependence into a vicious weapon. “Popeye” shows a boyish-looking impersonator of the spinach-eating hero plagued by a hangover, wielding a gun, and kidnaping the helpless Wimpy.

A cross-eyed Woodrow Wilson; a stately Canadian general pictured with his bored wife; and a lone Labrador peering out of an urn decorated with four birds symbolically transfer Wesley’s scrutiny of farcical fatherly power to governmental authority and military might. Rendered in pastels, these impeccable, understated paintings combine a carefree, childhood vision of the world with an incisive articulation of the fragility and ridiculous at the root of ceremonial authority.

Wesley’s simple but never uncomplicated pictures make seemingly obvious metaphors resonate with an odd mix of charm and trauma. More than any other figurative paintings, his formally elegant, pared-down compositions transform the pictorial flatness we associate with mechanical reproduction into saturated expanse of sensuous color. Their monochrome fields are both irresistible and untouchable.

Equally at home in the frivolous world of entertainment and the dread-filled universe of existentialism, Wesley’s crystalline images make physical the suspicion that these realms are never separated by much. His side-splitting and mind-bending art is an up-front portrayal of pop culture’s underbelly. His concentrated paintings bring a surplus of repressed sex and displaced violence to the surface, while leaving even more to their hidden depths. Somewhere between these spaces, mystery echoes as it might in the memories and fantasies of the viewer.

Dagwood in a straitjacket; Blondie in an amorous embrace with a YWCA shower-mate; Herb Woodley without his trousers; and a giant, pink-billed, blue-faced duck with floppy bunny ears and five slender legs sticking out of its mouth bring Wesley’s seriously funny pictures up to the present. His often beautiful paintings fuse the immediate optical punch of Pop Art with the drawn-out rewards of abstract painting’s exquisite surfaces.

At the beginning of the ‘60s, Wesley was grouped with Warhol, Lichtenstein and Oldenburg, but his comical subjects and weird formalism did not fit in with mainstream Pop. Since then he has been virtually ignored. After 30 years, his paintings look remarkably fresh and germane. Powerfully original and shamefully under-recognized, they bear comparison with the best figurative painting of their generation, and are among the most captivating being made today.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through Nov . 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Winning Watercolors: Rambunctious, biting and over-the-edge, Gladys Nilsson’s watercolors are also benign, inviting and funny. Like whimsical illustrations for children’s books, they pack an overdose of mini-narratives into a single scene. The main events they depict, such as a bow-legged woman serving a reheated piece of pizza, or a man peeking under a woman’s skirt as she tries on a new hat, are not their main attractions. These everyday scenarios are just excuses for the artist to make room for the incidental details and touching subplots that give life its spice.

Watercolor is Nilsson’s primary medium. Her 10 images at Ovsey Gallery contain a dazzling array of the diverse effects she draws from this simple, usually subsidiary medium. Sharp, sinuous contours, diaphanous veils, solid colors and touchable textures interweave in the jam-packed space of her art.

A typical watercolor by Nilsson consists of one to six figures--usually women but sometimes cowboys--who dominate the composition, and a dozen or two tiny characters caught up in their own little dramas. Like mischievous gnomes or eccentric elves, they run around the image, wreaking havoc on its consistency of scale, but rarely disturbing what’s happening in the big picture.

The central figures in Nilsson’s playful scenes are distorted but never demented. Their arms, legs, and necks bend and twist with the natural grace of an octopus’s limbs. Their faces portray a rogue’s gallery of malformations: Pinocchio noses, beady eyes, leering lips and expressions more suited to jack-o’-lanterns are the norm in their fantastic world. Nevertheless, Nilsson’s characters are far from being evil grotesques. Endowed with a silly sort of dignity, they seem to be aware of their looks, but above such petty concerns.

Nilsson is a founding member of Hairy Who, a ‘60s group of Chicago artists fascinated by raunchy humor and low-brown expression. As an avid collector of “outsider art,” she is included in LACMA’s “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art.” Although the light-hearted, gentle humor of her art is often overshadowed by the brash adolescence of this genre, her solo exhibition gives this aspect of her watercolors its due.

* Ovsey Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 935-1883, through Nov . 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Looking at Ourselves: Part Puritan town hall, secret enclave for cockfights, and ad hoc grandstand for traveling circuses or slide shows, Robert Therrien’s first exhibition in Los Angeles in more than seven years is all of these places at once and none of them for very long. Religious discipline, communal authority, sporting entertainment, illicit gambling and anti-social camaraderie are some of the associations momentarily evoked by his laborious, aggressive and unsettling transformation of the entire Angles Gallery.

When you enter the front gallery, all that is visible is a creamy white staircase that ascends into the upper regions of what used to be the large, rectangular back gallery. No lights illuminate the space in which you stand. The skylights have been blocked. The only visible light spills out of the space above the stairs.

Eleven steps deliver you to a theater-like chamber whose stepped floor dramatically descends at right angles, emptying into a cubic pit about six feet deep. The walls and ceiling have been covered with sheets of cardboard hastily painted stark white. Eleven sturdy benches, painted fire-engine red, seat six people each. They fan out from two sides of the pit, which sits, with both menacing authority and matter-of-fact neutrality, in the far corner of Therrien’s elevated container. Built around a hole, his enclosure demands of its audience--who are also its only actors--a type of aimless spectatorship in which we look at ourselves looking.

What initially seems to be a radical departure for the L.A.-based artist is in fact an intensification of the purposes that drive and define his well-known, discrete sculptures. (Three excellent examples of these precisely elusive works are in the auxiliary gallery two doors up the street.) Therrien’s simplified forms, often derived from top hats, snowmen, clouds and arches, occupy the ambiguous threshold between abstraction and representation, image and object, token and metaphor. They do not abandon the illusionism of painting as much as they disperse its effects around the gallery, transforming purely visual incidents into body-engaging allusions.

One way to think of Therrien’s installation is as an ambitious expansion of one of his most intriguing and mysterious pieces. His tiny painted sculptures shaped like old-fashioned keyholes function exactly like his powerful new work. They are positive forms that read as negative spaces. They not only reverse perspective, but locate the bodies of their viewers on the wrong side of the door, excluded from one kind of action, but open to another. The keyholes suggestively refer to voyeurism, but ultimately deny it, forcing the viewer to examine what happens when one looks at art.

Likewise, Therrien’s deceptively simple installation first makes literal an essential aspect of his enigmatic art, and then transforms it into an open metaphor for something else. His commanding piece of participatory theater grips us because it locates the power of art wholly within the physical world, without reducing its poetry to the dull ordinariness of material facts and expected experiences.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 & 2222 Main St., Santa Monica (310) 396-5019, through Nov . 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Unengaging Exercise: An unnecessarily repetitive exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jim Morphesis at Tortue Gallery equates the human torso to a quarter of beef. As if to dress up this hackneyed, Expressionist cliche with some kind of meaning, the L.A.-based artist tosses in references to Homer’s poetry, Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and enough gold leaf to decorate the gaudy frames of several masterpieces. The conceit fails. It results in a monotonous, unengaging exercise that belittles the intrinsic significance of the human body.

Even worse than the heavy-handed pretense of Morphesis’ arrogant and unearned references is his handling of paint, and, by implication, flesh. The problem is not that he lops off the heads of his figures or blurs them out of focus with choking smears of pigment, or that he cuts off their legs just below their similarly smudged genitals. The trouble is that despite the use of these conventional theatrical effects, his paintings remain static and flat. Not just calculating and hollow, but wholly devoid of life.

Morphesis’ images never even hint that their figures once breathed, that they have suffered a transformation similar to the slabs of meat. Instead, they hang listlessly on the wall, clamoring emptily for your attention, but delivering even less than titillation.

Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8878, through Nov. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.