ART REVIEWS : Images Play With Light, Sight at Asher/Faure

Looking at Maxwell Hendler’s predominantly monochromatic abstractions is like gazing into gorgeous mirrors only to see right through yourself. The pristine, impenetrable surfaces of his eight new paintings at Asher/Faure Gallery have the smoothness and fragility of glass, but they reflect only your ghostly silhouette.

They neither swallow up the ambient light that surrounds them, nor allow it to bounce off their slick surfaces. Instead, Hendler’s image-less pictures play with light--and sight--in an original, often fascinating, and sometimes unsettling manner.

Neither absorptive nor fully reflective, they hover in the nether world between images and things. His cool, blank pictures tantalize their viewers by simultaneously eliciting and frustrating the desire to know exactly where they begin and end, where the real space of the room stops and that of paintings’s artificial illusionism takes over.

Hendler’s works from the past three years superficially resemble John McCracken’s meticulous planks and plinths from the late ‘60s. Both artists use resin and masonite. Both also work in a patient, painstaking manner that is evident in their finished products. The high-tech sheen and exquisite craftsmanship of their works are unparalleled even by other members of the California “Finish Fetish” group.

The difference between McCracken’s and Hendler’s art is that one works with sculptural forms and the other with two-dimensional illusions. In our mixed-media, interdisciplinary era, this distinction might sound academic and old-fashioned, but it begins to articulate what is interesting in Hendler’s synthetic abstractions.

They preserve the power and viability of abstract painting not by struggling to create the impression that they open onto illusionistic deep space, or even a shallow, shrunken remnant of this potentially infinite realm. On the contrary, they appear to usurp the very space your body occupies when you stand before their deceptively passive surfaces.

Hendler’s images might look like they merely replay an earlier phase of American abstraction as benign, ironic and beautiful decorations. Their real power lies in their capacity to reverse the terms of illusionism, to decisively stake out the territory in which abstract painting and the viewer’s body occupy the same position.

Maxwell Hendler at Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through M a rch 27, closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Nuclear Nexus: Sharon Stewart’s “Toxic Tour of Texas” and Nancy Floyd’s “Nuclear Families” present two very different views of the nuclear industry. The double exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies also presents two very different approaches to the art of documentary photography.

Houston-based Stewart wants her work to be used as a weapon in a grass-roots legal battle against her state’s hazardous waste policies. Her photo-narrative alternates between unartistic photographs and fact-filled descriptions of volatile issues such as contaminated water, unsafe labor practices and corporate irresponsibility.

Floyd, by contrast, puts a human face on an abstract concept. Her pictures of nuclear workers clowning around on the job or relaxing at home with their wives, children and pets show that the people who work in nuclear facilities are “just ordinary folks with not-so-ordinary jobs.” Their statements describing what it is like to live with the constant risk of radiation gives her installation a disturbing undercurrent.

If Floyd’s conclusion is somewhat simplistic, her work at least leaves the viewer free to make up his or her own mind about difficult issues. Stewart’s more politically ambitious project leaves no room for such ambiguity. For her, nuclear waste presents a moral choice that demands a yes or no answer.

Stewart’s photographs oppose the morally righteous to the corrupt in an extremely loaded manner. The good are presented as women and children, priests and ministers, minorities and the elderly. We never see the face of evil, only its guarded gates, facilities and dumps. “Toxic Tour of Texas” might work well as courtroom evidence, but in a gallery it doesn’t raise consciousness as much as it confirms existing prejudices.

“A Legacy of Choices in a Technological Era” at Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 1048 West 6th St., (213) 482-3566, through April 2.

Smart and Sensuous: “A Carafe That Is a Blind Glass” begins with a quote from Gertrude Stein and ends nowhere in particular. This smart, sensuous exhibition at Occidental College’s Weingart Gallery gracefully demonstrates that much of art’s power resides in its pointlessness.

Artists Sabina Ott and Linda Basemer have brought together a fine selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos by 11 women (including themselves). Their tasteful, two-gallery installation suspends direct messages and explicit goals in favor of exploring the ambiguities of abstraction.

Designed to counteract a prevalent tendency toward dry, programmatic conceptualism, their show is most successful when it sidesteps argumentation altogether. The most compelling works refrain from delivering the viewer to predetermined ends, instead inviting us to get lost in a labyrinth whose detours and dead-ends are intellectually stimulating, physically engaging and emotionally resonant.

Pleasure and purposelessness take precise shape in Caren Furbeyre’s translucent plexiglass sculptures. Filled with water, oil and other mysteriously reflective materials, and scaled to the size of the human body, each of her works masterfully exploits the ways liquids bend vision, twisting our perceptions and creating beautiful illusions.

Furbeyre’s minimal-inspired sculptures offer an intriguing revision of that seminal style. They complicate the relationship between the inside and outside of an object. More importantly, they do so in terms of painting, by suffusing the optical illusions we expect of this art throughout sculpture’s three dimensions. The young artist’s three pieces reveal an extremely sophisticated sensibility that is immensely promising.

Although her sculptures alone make a visit worthwhile, strong paintings by Nancy Evans, Maria De Luca and Linda Burnham flesh out the exhibition’s thesis that liquidity and vision are inseparable. Uta Barth’s color photographs of flare and a wavy theater curtain, and Jennifer Steinkamp’s double video, twice reflected in convex mirrors, intensify the show’s focus on the differences between looking through things and looking into them.

Gertrude Stein’s enigmatic quote aptly serves the curators’ purposes. It deftly points to connections between a carafe and a feminine sensibility. It simultaneously registers the vast differences between women’s bodies and vessels for liquids. Like the poet’s “Blind Glass,” the works in the exhibition never serve up identifiable images of anyone, preferring instead to lure us into singular experience of their captivating interiors.

“A Carafe That Is a Blind Glass,” Weingart Gallery, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, (213) 259-2749, through March 12 .