ART REVIEWS : Gornik’s Work: Hyperbolic and Anemic

Nature is excessive: extremely mysterious, frighteningly still, unexpectedly malevolent. April Gornik’s six, large-scale landscape paintings, currently at Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum, follow suit. Here, everything works on the level of hyperbole. Every expanse of water trembles; every thread of light is moon-kissed; every cloud formation looms, threatening to explode.

Yet contrary to these hard-pressed semiotic clues, Gornik’s paintings, all produced over the past 10 years, are less spectacular than anemic. Unlike the work of 19th-Century German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, whom she regularly invokes, Gornik’s images are neither spiritually nor symbolically charged. They are, instead, barely there, emotionally flat.

Gornik’s landscapes depict the last moments before the storm, or those just before the calm that comes afterward. It isn’t always possible to distinguish between moments of incipient drama and incipient catharsis. Both are marked by intensity; both promise release. This work is disappointing, however, because it puts intensity on parade and release forever on hold.

This may have something to do with the conventional treatment of the pictorial elements. There is indeed a formula here: a churning sky and a quivering sea, bisected by one or more snaky spits of land. The predictability that ensues is heightened by the forced symmetry of too many of the compositions: Once you’ve seen one half, you’ve seen the other.

The paintings look, in fact, very much like huge Rorschach blots. These betray less about the viewers than about the painter herself. In them, Gornik reveals to us her desire to create sustained metaphors for different states of mind. Nature works as metaphor in the paintings of new landscape painters like Michael Zwack, Mark Innerst and Joan Nelson, with whom Gornik is often grouped. But the same doesn’t hold true here. Gornik is trapped by her own relentlessly safe approach. She winds up with art that, however beautiful, is both materially and psychologically inert.

* Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, (310) 456-4851. Closed Mondays, through Sept. 26.

Racial Identity: The African presence in Central and South America dates back to the arrival of the conquistadors, many of whom were accompanied by African slaves. Tony Gleaton’s black-and-white photographs, shot in Costa Chica on Mexico’s Pacific Coast and Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, investigate the impact of centuries of struggle--for dignity and to preserve a rich cultural heritage--upon contemporary Mexicans of African descent.

At a moment when issues of ethnicity, race and assimilation are especially pressing, Gleaton’s provocative photographs, now on view at the California Afro-American Museum, are of particular relevance. They beg all sorts of thorny questions. How are we to think of the man posed in front of his fishing boat, the young boy clutching a tortilla in the doorway of a candle-filled chapel, and the woman guarding her neat-as-a-pin chicken stand? Are they Afro-Mexicans or simply Mexicans? How do these individuals, also known as “Costenos,” think of themselves? How do they characterize their identity?

Gleaton skirts particular answers, moral certainties and ideological pieties. Despite its politically charged subject matter, his work is cool, and formally quite sophisticated. The tone ranges from lazily romantic (beautiful silhouettes of mothers and children; an image of a fisherman with a pole slung over his shoulder that is part Robert Mapplethorpe, part Julia Margaret Cameron) to the slyly matter-of-fact (an older man with a sizable gut painstakingly shaving his face; a row of dark-skinned little girls lovingly clutching a pair of light-skinned dolls). These are fine photographs--important, but never heavy-handed. Gleaton slips a welcome hit of aesthetic consciousness into the sluggish corpus of documentary photography.

* California Afro-American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, (213) 744-7432. Closed Mondays, through Oct. 12.