ART REVIEWS : Social Critique With a Colorful Touch

In a new batch of wonderful paintings--as economical as cartoons, yet dense and luscious--Thomas Trosch fashions a world so divinely fey, merrily trivial and fitfully absurd that it takes a few moments until it registers as our own.

Here, would-be cosmopolites get hostess tips from professional sycophants in extravagantly striped couture hats, neophyte aestheticians practice shop-talk in sparkling artist’s studios that could only have been designed by MGM circa 1951, and wide-eyed dilettantes are initiated, over tea, into the intricacies of bidding at Sotheby’s.

We are made privy to the conversation via word balloons floating above the artfully arranged hairdos. Only it’s not exactly a conversation--texts are snatched deadpan from various sources, ranging from Dorothy Rogers’ books on style to Wittgenstein’s treatises on color.

On the one hand, Trosch is as biting as a writer as Tom Wolfe about the mechanics of social climbing and the white-glove politicking of the art world-cum-cafe society. Yet, he too easily (thank goodness for us) gives in to the pleasures--for both patron and painter--of it all, the pleasures of both ritual and object.

Here, then, social critique is crowded out by a circus of color, madness and light--lush, dripping swaths of paint, manically encrusted surfaces, pattern upon pattern upon pattern. All this to describe cartoony interiors filled to bursting with abstract paintings rendered in loving miniature and oodles of “important” sculptures resembling eggs or jumbo Eskimo Pies, to the delight of their bug-eyed, gleefully mystified viewers.

Trosch works in a riff on modernist self-reflexivity, but his art is quite unlike that of his postmodernist peers. If anything, it recalls Florine Stettheimer’s whimsical paintings of New York’s first avant-garde--minus Stettheimer’s mannered naivete. What Trosch finds instead is a balance between knowingness and not caring a whit about what he knows--except, that is, about how to paint. About that he cares--and knows.

* Ruth Bloom, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Oct. 23.

One-Person Show: Nicole Eisenman’s second one-person show at Shoshana Wayne is fast, furious, twisted--and remarkably sincere about the whole thing. Eisenman’s murals, paintings and drawings look much like postmodern pastiches--a mad mix of pop cultural references (from Bambi to gay pornography) and art historical styles (from Renaissance chiaroscuro to the realism of the Ash Can School).

But the work is unconcerned with portraying postmodernism’s fractured universe. Instead, it represents--in broad, sure strokes--a perfectly imagined alternate, a world of lesbian kissing booths and Amazon birthday parties, where packs of topless, sword-wielding women on horseback castrate defenseless men and Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon high-tail it out of the museum, their distorted faces aglow as they wave bye-bye.

Eisenman’s utopia is, obviously, no Sapphist bliss-scape. It is a world where men are not so much absent as powerless, where women are fueled by anger and thrilled by their own capacity for violence. Large-scale ink-wash drawings, for example, depict female warriors congregating to show off their blood-soaked plunder. Small cartoons include Wilma Flintstone, in the throes of passion, ripping off the leg of her lover, Betty Rubble, and registering nothing but a blithe, “So what?”

The problem is that despite the subject matter, Eisenman plays it straight. It’s not that there is no humor here (there is, though it tends toward the sophomoric). There is, however, no irony--neither about the appropriation of “old master” techniques and the “heroic” scale of the Reginald Marsh-style figures, nor about the artist’s wham-bam reversal of the power relations which characterize the status quo.

Eisenman insists that revenge is sweet, but she doesn’t point out where to go after the blood bath. She doesn’t even pause long enough to wonder--and her work suffers for it. Frantic energy can be a good thing, but Eisenman has not found the proper means to reflect upon that energy. The result is work that sweeps you along--until its excess adrenaline makes you tired.

* Shoshana Wayne, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Oct. 23. Artistic Analogy: The title of Steve Derrickson’s current show--”Apropos Eye Flower”--seems at first rather euphemistic. These are, after all, books, drawings and collages predicated upon the morphological similarity between the eye and the vagina.

Derrickson is, of course, not the first artist to make this analogy. The Surrealists, and before them, the Symbolists, took to such biologically inspired slippages like flies to honey--or artists to whatever is deemed taboo.

Yet Derrickson may be the first to address this resemblance--between what psychoanalytic theory identifies as the masculine attribute of power and the feminine sign of difference--with equal parts obsession and detachment. That’s what makes one so twitchy around the work. One imagines it originated in some sadistic fever dream; yet that energy--misogynistic or not--has been all but smothered by a milky film of blankness.

So the title, “Apropos Eye Flower,” is not faint-hearted, but telling. For Derrickson’s drawings--stacked in neat rows, or bound in books--are unexpectedly asexual. To call them delicate doesn’t go far enough; they are neurasthenic, depleted, withdrawn. Yet they are marked by something inarguably seductive--perhaps a perverse desire to bring something dormant to the fore, or alternately, to experience the aesthetic equivalent of near-death.

Derrickson takes the elements of a familiar libidinal economy and drains them of their white-hot charge--not in deference to any political agenda, but simply because he wants to. One wants, in turn, to look at his images--and continues to think about them--despite their reticent and/or retrograde qualities. Something, then, is working here, though--and perhaps because--the effort doesn’t show for a minute.

* Sue Spaid, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays, through Sept. 30. Encoding Plaid: For Paul Tzanetopoulos, plaid is seasonless--a perfect metaphor for information and the relentless procession of minutiae that characterizes the information society.

In his current show, plaid is indefatigable and inescapable. A sheet of paper covered with a plaid of multicolored inks pokes out of an old typewriter; another plaid is rendered in a full color, photographic blowup; a multipart panel painting offers a pixilated view of a plaid gone mad, distorted till it resembles the eye of a hurricane.

These crisscrossing stripes--and permutations of such--conjure the modernist grid, the constantly reinvented blank slate and geometrized call to order. Yet they do so only to remind us that there is no blank slate, no order that has not already been regulated by various rules, accommodated to various schemes, and subjected to various systems of interpretation.

These plaids, then, are postmodern creatures. They reject the fantasy of transparency, attesting to the encodedness of not just our art, but our lives. Tzanetopoulos drives the point home by incorporating into the exhibition various TV sets and L.E.D. signboards (the mechanics of information); and multicolored die and decks of cards (the randomness of information). But such a framework is redundant. The plaid speaks volumes on its own.

* Dorothy Goldeen, 1597 9th St., Santa Monica (310) 395-0222. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Oct. 2.