ART REVIEWS : Davie’s Abstractions Offer Treat for Mind--Not Eyes

Karin Davie is a talented young painter, born in 1965, whose large-scale abstractions revamp aspects of recent art history. Her clever stripe paintings on shaped canvases rob their visual vibrancy from Op, steal their shape from Frank Stella, pilfer their presence from Pattern and Decoration art and lift their drips and diagonal orientation from the work of Mary Heilmann.

Unfortunately, Davie’s three pairs of paintings at Kim Light Gallery give their viewers little more than a smart, art school slide-lecture. Once you’ve identified their sources, there’s not much left for the paintings to do. Their meaning is exhausted in their referential function.

This is an ironic predicament for abstract painting. The fundamental purpose of abstraction is to give pause to referential readings, in favor of forcing the viewer to grapple with inarticulate, indeterminate visual phenomena.

Davie’s style accounts for much of abstract art’s current resurgence in popularity. Her paintings falsely flatter the viewer, tricking us into thinking that understanding abstraction is simply a matter of translating signs and decoding symbols. For all their sensuous physicality, her images are essentially intellectual exercises. They don’t challenge or reinterpret their precedents, as much as they insinuate themselves into the privileged, historical lineage they sketch.

Davie’s candy-colored waves--in peppermint, strawberry and raspberry--are low-calorie, sugar-coated treats. Like candy-covered chocolates that melt in your mouth, not in your hands, they play out their effects in your mind, not in your eyes. Without risking messiness, they miss their chance to be more than safe, well-mannered distractions.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through June 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Beautiful Illusions: Darren Waterston’s luminous landscapes and brooding abstractions lurk in the netherworld between misty-eyed romanticism and clear-sighted sobriety. Torn between the desire to re-create a natural paradise and the knowledge that this fantasy has been shattered by modern society, his masterfully crafted paintings struggle to have it both ways.

They evoke the wistful solitude of uncorrupted nature as a fading memory, a dim recollection of a time when things were gloriously different. Waterston’s 29 oils on canvas and panel at Jan Baum Gallery memorialize a bygone era, giving shape to a world poised on the threshold of disappearance.

To achieve this effect, the 28-year-old artist laboriously creates beautiful illusions, building up layers of underpainting, delicate tonal variations and exquisite luminosity.

He then subjects his seductive illusions to acid and turpentine washes, layers of wax and varnish, and other physical manipulations that damage and distress them.

Many of his paintings appear to be weathered antiques. Some even seem to be wounded, as if their surfaces have been cut and bruised. As with the work of Ross Bleckner, which they resemble, the dots, patterns and decorative flourishes are meant to disrupt his illusions by brutally acknowledging the picture plane.

The problem with Waterston’s attempt to inject some critical distance into his pretty pictures is that the tactic he has chosen is a worn-out Modernist device that, over the past two decades, has become a Postmodern cliche.

Sentimentality and nostalgia thus swamp Waterston’s paintings, not because they are trapped in Romanticism, but in an outdated formalism.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Solo Quintet: Raw vitality and rigorous discipline dovetail in the five powerful paintings that make up Sam Reveles’ first American solo show. The 34-year-old’s auspicious debut at Regen Projects verges on the magisterial.

If it weren’t for the down-to-earth humility of his work, it would be easy to miss their generosity. As it is, their violent, inhuman turbulence nearly drowns out their hidden serenity.

At once patient and passionate, Reveles’ abstractions give back more than you bring to them. Made of ricocheting straight-lines, muted earth tones and intense determination, they are beautiful records of human willpower. Dried blood and fresh water, vegetal life and mindless repetition, the desire for direction and the willingness to get lost--these are among the associations brought forth by Reveles’ dense, overloaded paintings.

Light flickers through sharply angled blue, green and reddish brown lines, creating the impression that each emits a silent breath of its own. They seem to defy the cruelty of fate’s arbitrariness and, simultaneously, to accept their place in the grand scheme of things.

The dark knowledge that there’s no guide to life, and the desperate hope that eventually you’ll find one, also emerge from these immense yet intimate works. Reveles’ paintings pulse and quiver with something like primal energy, sometimes striking a resonant chord with the viewer, and at others remaining mute and impenetrable.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through June 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.