ART REVIEWS : Works of the Body From Keith Boadwee, Robert Adams

The art of portraiture gets up-ended and turned backward in Keith Boadwee’s hilarious, no-holds-barred rampage through popular culture and modern art history. With penetrating wit, lovable clumsiness and sometimes stunning simplicity, his often large-scale photographs at Kim Light Gallery also break rules outside the realm of art. The young, L.A.-based artist’s irreverent images fly wildly in the face of the broadest notions of good taste as they deliver a raw abundance of off-color fun and playful fantasy.

Although you would never know it on first glance, Boadwee himself is the only sitter in a dozen or so photographs that focus on a silly array of finger-puppets. His cast of characters includes the Seven Dwarfs, the Simpsons and the Flintstones, as well as the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man, the inhabitants of McDonaldland, and cute puppies, elephants and ducks. Each appears before a variety of backdrops that have been swiftly painted to resemble schematic, abstract landscapes.

Something uncanny in the pictures arouses your curiosity and causes you to scrutinize the simple tricks they rely on to create their rudimentary illusions. Suddenly, nothing in the photographs is what it seemed. When you realize that Boadwee has dressed up his genitals as various cartoon characters and painted his stomach and thighs as landscape elements, you are unable, ever again, to see his images as harmless, homemade animation cels.

The experience is like one from Saturday cartoons, when a character sets up camp on what he believes to be a small, deserted island only to discover he’s sitting on the back of a whale. Boadwee’s photographs light-handedly turn this moment of dawning knowledge to darker, more critical purposes. His pictures humorously substantiate a male tendency to talk about their penises as if they had personalities--and wills--of their own. The artist cuts this fantasy down to size by returning it to pre-adolescence, to just another dumb childhood plaything.

The photographs’ meanings are not exhausted by such direct, sociological critique. They function as colorful updates of Vito Acconci’s notorious performances from the ‘60s, in which he dressed up his penis and recited stories to it. Boadwee’s images also manifest an unapologetic love of Expressionist painting, of spontaneously smearing loaded brushes of wet paint across pristine surfaces to create uncensored images with bold visual impact.

This style of painting is currently out of fashion because it has been equated with such characteristically male aspirations as self-centered self-aggrandizement, domination and control. Boadwee’s photographs smartly show that painting cannot be reduced to this equation. His images provide generous evidence that the pleasures of this art continue to flourish in different media.

A series of 3-by-3-foot targets painted on the artist’s derriere, and five abutted panels depicting monochrome posteriors--titled “Who’s Afraid of Red, Blue, Yellow, Green and Orange?”--intensify the effects of Boadwee’s smaller “self-portraits.” At once tongue-in-cheek homages to Barnett Newman’s magisterial abstractions from the ‘50s and Kenneth Noland’s mesmerizing targets from the ‘60s--as well as Jasper Johns’ seminal painted constructions from the ‘50s--Boadwee’s graphic images are also send-ups of aesthetic purity and high seriousness.

They replay color-field painting’s fascination with the integrity of the picture plane as a farcically futile attempt to purge illusionistic deep space from art. In his blown-up close-ups of rear ends, the concept of depth takes the literal shape of an anus. Boadwee’s in-your-face abstractions obliterate the difference between looking at images and getting mooned. By reversing the terms of self-revelation and exposure, his photographs’ free abstract painting from the weight of history, indulging its original impulses toward explicitly selfish pleasures.

In an adjoining gallery, Robert Adams’ silhouettes of businessmen flatly describe the difficulties of holding stereotypical middle-class identity together. If the ideas his art addresses are complex and important, his treatment of them is simplistic and illustrative. His neatly arranged pieces fail to physically embody or compellingly convey their obvious intellectual justifications.

Each of the young, Phoenix-based artist’s works consists of a faceless silhouette of an approximately eight-inch-tall man wearing a business suit and fedora. Adams has carefully cut these nearly identical figures from black paper and glued them to white, page-like sheets. He has also cut each figure into at least two pieces. Each of these is separately framed and hung next to its neighboring part of the body. The most fragmented figure has been divided into 30 components, spreading out into an almost unidentifiable constellation.

Adams’ art speaks of obsessive-compulsive behavior; the need to fit one’s identity into prescribed compartments and the impossibility of achieving this goal. The trouble with his work is that it tells us nothing about the traumas, disappointments and realizations that accompany experiences of not living up to social expectations.

In this tight-lipped body of work, Adams has not yet found a suitable means for fully expressing the concepts his images only vaguely imply. For example, the profound philosophic problem of mind-body dualism receives only cursory treatment in “Scalp,” whose brain (and hat) floats above the rest of the body from which it has been severed. Likewise, being indecisive takes literal form in “Split,” in which the figure is split from head to toe, precisely divided between one side and the other.

Adams’ one-word titles, such as “Dice,” “Halve,” “Chop,” “Shred,” “Snap” and “Gut,” intentionally sound like cookbook instructions. They also describe violent accidents. The more fragmentary figures suggest increasingly schizophrenic personality disorders. Or, they might just be more elaborate arrangements of black-and-white abstractions. With so few details allowed into the picture, it is impossible to tell the difference.

Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through Feb . 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Messing With Minds: In half of Linda Stark’s sexy, synthetic and slick abstractions, immaculate rivulets of oil paint flow with unnatural accuracy. Each meticulously poured, three-dimensional drip angles diagonally across 10 of her tiny canvases, less than a millimeter away from the next, nearly indistinguishable band. Together, these obsessively repeated stripes form tightly interwoven patterns, jewel-like in their precision.

Each of these square paintings, at Cirrus Gallery, begins by mimicking the canvas’s weave. Then it defies your eye’s ability to follow the endless overs-and-unders that constitute its surface. Next, it boggles your mind’s capacity to understand the incredibly obsessive effort required to make it. Finally, it quivers and jitters inside your eyeballs, momentarily becoming unmoored from the emphatic presence of its materials. Its thickly built-up surface generates an almost hallucinatory experience of disembodied weightlessness.

Stark’s third solo show contains many of the best paintings she has made. The young, L.A.-based artist has, for the most part, abandoned the quirky, feminine forms that interrupted the cool surfaces of her earlier works. Figure-ground relationships have almost completely dissolved into an exquisite, all-over evenness.

This strategy has been common to modernist abstraction throughout the century. In the ‘60s, one strand of formalist painting sought to eliminate the difference between the weave of the canvas and the paint that sat on top of it by staining and soaking thinned-down washes into the fabric of the canvas. Stark’s art casts a knowing glance at that moment in history and then swallows it up. Her shiny, pristine paintings put a mod, Pop spin on the idea of transcendence.

In contrast to traditional abstraction, Stark refrains from pursuing any sort of idealized, spiritual immateriality. Her brightly colored and labor-intensive paintings prefer to work with more common experiences and more verifiable perceptions. Their insistent materialism gives them an undeniable physical presence, a no-nonsense, here-and-now quality that will have no truck with the ineffable.

Sometimes, this emphasis on pure materiality gives her paintings the presence of little sculptures, of objects that hang on the wall but repudiate the illusionism intrinsic to two-dimensional images. Stark’s best works, however, hold her fascination with materiality together with its subtle dissolution in paintings that are as interesting for what has been done to them as for what they continue to do to your eyes.

Cirrus Gallery, 542 S . Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.