SPACE PROGRAM : Stark Does Not Mean Empty in Pamela Wilson’s Paintings

One thing’s for sure: Pamela Wilson is a painter , and not just in the routine sense of a person who sweeps a brush over a canvas. She understands how to make volumes and silhouettes echo each other in harmonious ways and how to coax a pinched drama out of a severely limited palette of browns and blacks.

Using established techniques honed by a battery of famous painters from Manet to early Picasso, Wilson selectively emphasizes figures, plays subtle tricks with the viewer’s point of view and turns vast tracts of empty brown space to brooding good use.

Several of her recent paintings--on view at Stuart Katz’ Loft in Laguna Beach through Nov. 27, and also (by appointment) in Katz’s home--demonstrate Wilson’s valiant effort at probing the secret tensions and bitterness of children and middle-aged women.

In “Daughter,” a bearded man reading a book turns away from a dressmaker’s dummy with a cage-like contraption stuck in its chest. The man’s bulk and concentration is emphasized by his position in the extreme foreground of the canvas.

Clearly, his daughter feels she hardly enters his zone of attention except as a “dummy.” The steel bars over her heart are a bit too obvious, however; another device might have lifted the content of the painting to a level equal to its compositional finesse.

In “Ocean Gypsy,” a heavy, older nude woman in black knee socks sits with her head turned away. On her back, she sports tattoos of a fish and a long-haired flirtatious-looking mermaid--images that were perhaps more apropos years ago, before her body assumed such a bulky immobility. The incongruity of the woman’s tattoos reinforce the gulf between conventional sexual allure and the brutal facts of aging, while the separate volumes of the woman’s upper arm, breast, midriff fat roll and meaty thigh reinforce each other in a satisfyingly painterly way.

A yelling boy in black tights, his chest stiff with rage, stands next to a shorthand image of his mother--a dressmaker’s dummy wearing a white bra--in “Twin Failures.” The painting is set in an uncertain, dreamlike terrain spiked with Wilson’s favorite landmarks: widely spaced telephone poles, indicating a breakdown in familial communications. (Wilson’s other frequent motif is a blank billboard, the visual equivalent of deafening silence.)

Bony, middle-aged, with hugely teased hair, harlequin glasses and absurdly plastic-looking conical breasts poking out of holes cut in the top of a two-piece swimsuit, the woman in “Regarding Georgia” stares out with set lips as if daring anyone to tell her she lacks physical allure. This painting seems to be about the woman’s pathetic eagerness to measure up to someone else’s sexual fantasy.

Many of Wilson’s figures have three- or four-digit numbers inscribed, more or less sketchily, on their bodies. Unlike their most obvious referent, concentration camp tattoos, these numbers seem capable of being easily erased. Do they represent a transitory feeling of shamefulness--a “brand” that can be removed by positive thinking? Wilson’s rationale for this device seems rather murky.

In much of her work, she still seems to be skating on the surface of her subject. A cult of stylized weirdness serves as a convenient stand-in for a more probing investigation of a tormented personality. Wilson’s plump or skinny women in beehive hairdos--who often wear harlequin glasses, long gloves and unglamorous underwear--sometimes seem too freakishly pathetic, too obviously staged to wring sympathy from viewers.

Wilson made a major miscalculation in “King of the Hill,” an image of an armless nude whose head seems to have been chipped on top and whose stomach displays the number 5299. This victimized figure is a just a heavy-handed caricature that tells us nothing about the complexity of human suffering. Similarly, the bald older woman with smeared red lipstick on her grimacing lips in “Georgie Says” looks overly clown-like, a pathetic figure exaggerated to theatrical dimensions for no apparent reason.

Less blatantly, “Hedonist No. 12995”--in which the subject is a Picasso-esque nude waif with a number on her chest, a transparent brown tunic and long black gloves--offers too much stock distress and not enough probing beneath the surface. On a visual level, the figure is much more clearly thought out, with the lines of a chair back delicately echoing the thin sliver of her bare thigh.

Wilson’s more mundane images serve as a good foil for her blatantly oddball women. A vast pink-robed woman with her hair in curlers gestures urgently in “Parlor for Disenchanted,” while her cigarette leaves a light film of smoke obscuring the flowered wallpaper. What stirs her out of her couch potato existence? Who is her audience? There is as much, if not more, mystery here than in Wilson’s more obviously emotionally bruised figures.

When she conjures up a Victorian childhood of high-button shoes and elaborate layers of clothing, Wilson risks sentimentalizing her figures’ secret anguish, wrapping it in a sweet haze of nostalgia. In “Unforgiven Oddity,” she surmounts the problem by moving in closely and focusing on the revelation of posture and dress: A child in a white gown and a dunce’s cap sits in bent and sullen agony against an old-fashioned wood-paneled schoolroom wall.

In her statement posted in the gallery, Wilson writes that she enjoys “the challenge of giving emotion a distinct visual space,” an apt description of the unspecified--or bleak, or uncertain--locales in which her anxious or stolid-seeming figures exist.

More specifically, she says her work is about “the legacy of low self-esteem which seems so easily passed on from parent to child.” This is a bit more troubling--not from a psychological, but from an artistic point of view. Low self-esteem is certainly a fact of life, but the best art is far more ambiguous and complex than the platitudes of pop psychology.

Disappointingly--but revealingly--Wilson writes that she hopes viewers “will have a positive experience” when they “reach inside.” Good art transcends group therapy. Her job--and it is certainly an extraordinarily difficult one--is to find fresh, compelling and sufficiently open-ended visual equivalents for her painful feelings, not to help viewers sort out their lives.

An experienced portrait artist who received her M.F.A. in painting and photography from UC Santa Barbara this year, Wilson is quite prolific. That’s good news, since her chosen project may well take a lifetime of searching for the dead weights of her own emotional past and plotting how to coax them onto the fragile surface of a canvas.

Cathy Curtis covers art for The Times Orange County Edition. What

“Pamela Wilson: Recent Paintings.”

When

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, through Nov. 27.

Where

Stuart Katz’ Loft, 2091 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach.

Whereabouts

San Diego (I-405) Freeway to California 133 (Laguna Canyon Road). Gallery is on the left, in the 2075-2095 Industrial Complex, above Canyon Box Inc.

Wherewithal

Admission is free.

Where to call

(714) 497-2569.