Car Culture Without Driving Narrative

There is something reassuring about Michael Chapman’s paintings and watercolors on view at Tatistcheff Gallery. Maybe it’s because they depict ordinary things for which many of us hold fond associations: old-fashioned cars and lampposts, toy trains and boats, cute little dogs.

Yet, at the same time, there is a noir quality to these highly stylized, spare landscapes and interior scenes that makes them all the more enticing.

“They seem authentic. There is a sense of real experience that I really like even though they are fantasy worlds,” said Terrence Rogers, the gallery’s director.

Each of the 17 works in the show contains at least one of his rounded and solid, intensely colored ‘40s and ‘50s-style cars. They are parked next to beach houses, before an inviting park entrance and outside a fortress-like building that contains the “Claude Exhibit.”

“The Enchanted Landscape” is a 13-by-108-inch maquette for a proposed mural for the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte. It presents a pleasant view of the ocean from a parking lot dotted with, among other things, cars, parking meters, a couple of dogs and a bright yellow fire hydrant.

Although the 35-year-old artist was raised and still lives in the Orange County community of Fullerton, Chapman’s cars are not derived from an immersion in Southern California’s car culture. They stem instead from the Buick in Edward Hopper’s 1957 painting “Western Motel.”

“That car looked like it just arrived or was ready to depart,” Chapman said. For him, Hopper captured “the moment.”

His own compositions, devoid of human figures, convey a sense of time momentarily standing still. However, those with parking meters also seem to suggest the passing of time. Preferring to leave his work open to interpretation, Chapman embarks on a painting and completes it without any set story line in mind.

“I try to start something, but there is no narrative. There is a starting point, but no intended finishing point,” he said. “Within that, viewers can come up with their own stories. I want to draw them back to their own frame of reference. I like it when people tell me they definitely see something in a painting. It’s amazing the stories I get back.”

“Fear of the Dark,” an oil on canvas painting that he also reproduced as a lithograph with watercolor wash, portrays a toy train and an inviting stuffed chair in an otherwise empty room. Light from a large window casts a triangular shadow on the wall. A car sits just outside the window.

Chapman’s lithographer saw in the composition the “stages of life as far as materialism” is concerned, Chapman said. The train and car symbolize youth and adolescence respectively. The chair stands in for the comfort of middle age; the light for the wisdom of old age.

Objects such as the toy train or the airplanes in “The Desperate Hours” are among the newest elements of Chapman’s work.

He may sketch things for a year before incorporating them in a painting. “The objects come into drawings and paintings intuitively,” he said. “It’s a matter of, do they work in a composition? When I’m designing, I’m most interested in formal qualities--composition, color, form. If I like them, they end up in my paintings.”

“Michael Chapman: New Paintings” is open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Dec . 5 at Tatistcheff Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica. Call (310) 395-8807.

LESS-DIMENSIONAL ART: Mariella Simoni, an Italian-born, Belgium-based painter whose work was shown at Documenta IX this year in Kassel, Germany, gave up working in three dimensions years ago to “make an interrogation,” she said, of two-dimensional space. For her, comprehending the techniques and theories of the flat surface was not only more important, but such a pursuit would give her a better understanding of the third dimension and beyond.

Her non-representational tempera-on-wood paintings on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery reflect her desire to explore not only two-dimensionality but color, texture and the interplay of light and gravity with these elements. Through that, she rethinks systems, theories, techniques and her own life.

“I saw her work in Paris two years ago,” said Shoshana Blank, director of the gallery. “They were conceptual. It came through as very intellectual, but the way she paints is very seductive.”

Simoni, 44, works with tempera because she can make her own colors, creating further opportunities to investigate techniques.

She applies her paint--in shades of maroon, green and black, to name a few--in various textures and translucencies. In some works, the paint is so thick that they are turned into three-dimensional forms.

In others, flat color bands do not completely cover the surface, calling up images of landscapes.

The only large work, “Terrazza,” which occupies a whole wall, contains long horizontal bands enclosed by a thick ribbon of paint at the bottom. They suggest rainbows, lines of text and, on the darker side, bars of detention.

Simoni said she wants to involve viewers in her explorations and that they can also “make an interrogation of the space.”

“If you are strong inside, you have the possibility to change something in the world, to become more free,” she said. “It’s a romantic idea, but it’s true.”

“Mariella Simoni: Paintings” is open 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday this week at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica. Call (310) 451-3733.