ART REVIEWS : Greg Colson: Homage to the Repairman

Greg Colson makes undramatic, understated sculptures from toolroom leftovers and common household scraps. Thoroughly suspicious of flashy overstatement and unnecessary pretense, his curious, inquisitive works at Angles Gallery pay secret homage to anonymous repairmen.

At first glance, Colson’s bolted-together, wall-mounted assemblages look neutral, unassuming and inaccessible. They embody an impersonal, unsentimental ethos of measured labor. Their simple, straightforward forms appear to value practicality, efficiency and a job well done above all else.

More monochromatic and abstract than anything he has exhibited during the past seven years, the 36-year-old, L.A.-based artist’s latest constructions rank among his most accomplished, resolved and mature. They are also more resistant to poetic interpretation. Colson’s subdued structures manifest a strong sense of restraint. They provide very little ground for the tender associations and touching invocations of memory that usually accompany art made from found objects.

A hint of nostalgia, or a waft of melancholia nevertheless escapes from the worn surfaces and cleverly adapted components of his wood, metal and plastic assemblages. This poignant evocation comes from the fact that today, the impulse to repair things has all but vanished. In our throw-away, increasingly electronic society, we habitually replace appliances and devices with new and improved commodities rather than hire someone to fix the old ones.

Colson’s predominantly white, but sometimes silver, beige or gray, sculptures record this general cultural shift. His thoughtful objects give compelling physical form to the fact that concrete materials, touchable substances and visible things have been displaced by invisible transmissions of electricity, mysterious microchips and computer-generated waves of energy. Colson’s art physically maps this radical alteration in contemporary reality.

His most recent works are miniature models of docks and piers, graphs of consumer behavior and television channels. Together, they memorialize a time when shipyards and harbors represented the most up-to-date means of communication--the most modern way to transmit goods and information.

Today, long after airports have replaced this early 20th-Century means of exchange, and now that mass-produced personal computers regularly contain more jam-packed docks and complex networks, Colson’s art sketches haunting connections between the past and the present.

His exhibition simultaneously mourns the disappearance of the individual repairman and acknowledges the future’s emergent technologies of telecommunication. Like oversized circuitry, his diagrammatic docks and piers model two eras and scales of transportation systems.

* Greg Colson at Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Abstract Pleasures: Patrick Nickell’s little wall-mounted sculptures are delightful, ethereal constructions. The best ones have the light-handed presence of doodles--those free-flowing shapes your hand draws when your mind goes somewhere else. Like three-dimensional sketches that weightlessly dangle in space, his 10 quirky objects, accompanied by six pencil drawings at Michael Kohn Gallery, celebrate restless manual dexterity.

Made from thin strips of corrugated cardboard that Nickell has partially wrapped in plastic and glued together in random, organic patterns, half of his abstract sculptures recall microorganisms or cellular structures. Bits of colored string often connect their various see-through clusters or hang aimlessly from them.

Nickell deftly creates the impression that his playful, energetic forms have been pieced together by a talented and undisciplined school kid, one who’s refused to make something useful during craft hour. His casually graceful works transform the simplest of materials into whimsical instances of his imagination’s free play.

His other sculptures consist of tin cans that he has cut into curved shapes and glued to equally odd segments of finely meshed screen. These tubular forms look as if they’re turning themselves inside-out as they drift and tumble around on the gallery walls. Their suspended movements mimic those of growing plants or blossoming flowers.

Nickell falters when his recycled metal sculptures too literally resemble bouquets of flowers. When his art’s irrepressible energy is tied too tightly to the task of representing reality, its animate vitality is choked off in an uninteresting stasis. This happens only once or twice in an exhibition that generously serves up the pleasures of formal abstraction.

* Patrick Nickell at Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-7713, through May 8, closed Sunday and Monday.

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Nerdy Realism: Sandow Birk steals the compositions of famous paintings from art history to paint grim, contemporary events. In one of his oils on canvas, the risen Christ comes back as a Latino gangbanger who solemnly displays his battle wounds. In another, Eugene Delacroix’s 19th-Century depiction of Liberty’s triumphant stance on a Parisian barricade gets recast as a disgruntled youth’s participation in the L.A. riots.

While Birk’s intentions may be laudatory, his works at Julie Rico Gallery are too stiffly academic. They ring hollow and fall flat in the face of the violence and mayhem they attempt to take issue with.

Their take on history is glib, empty and cynical. Instead of using historical forms to say something intelligent about current events in Los Angeles, Birk’s nerdy realism merely dresses up cliched urban myths in outdated styles. His pictures pretend to address troublesome social issues but actually only aspire to attach themselves to a simplistic version of art history.

Birk’s awkward works first simplify the last 500 years or so of Western painting and then try to insert themselves into the reductive narrative they outline. The history of representational painting, according to them, is nothing but a propagandistic lie designed to trick us into believing that values such as heroism, honor and integrity ever existed, let alone that they might continue into the present.

In the world described by these images, vicious self-interest has eliminated all types of idealism. Given the bleakness of Birk’s outlook, it is no wonder that his paintings focus on murder and devastation. Their own tragedy is that they rob these tragic events of their psychological resonance, leaving little more than a mean-spirited cartoon-world in which senselessness reigns.

* Sandow Birk at Julie Rico Gallery, 2623 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-1177, through May 9, closed Monday.

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In Living Color: “Technocolor: The Future That Never Was” is a fun-filled run through the bright side of the spectrum. Curated by Bennett Roberts, this vivacious group exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery more than makes up for the looseness of its organizing premise with the rollicking good humor and infectious exuberance of the works it includes.

It’s the most colorful group show in recent memory and a welcome antidote to the stodgy, black-and-white seriousness that too often accompanies art with a high moral purpose. The virtue of “Technocolor” lies in its appeal to hedonism.

Roberts’ overdose of an installation immediately grabs your eyeballs and doesn’t let go until it’s bounced them around a gallery jam-packed with dripping, sensuous surfaces, gooey textures, sexy pranks and seductive slickness.

Standouts include Jim Isermann’s mutant fusion of carpeting and art; Caren Furbeyre’s rainbow aquarium; Jacci Den Hartog’s luscious puddles of rubber, and Julian Goldwhite’s mini-salon of hyperactive, hallucinatory paintings. As a whole, “Technocolor” dabbles in “forgotten” styles from the past three decades to inject the pleasures of wild colors back into contemporary art.

* “Technocolor” at Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through May 15, closed Sunday and Monday.