ART REVIEWS : The Media as the Source of Inspiration

Rodney G. King, Mike Tyson, Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, Peter Tosh, David Koresh, George Bush and Yitzhak Shamir populate the information-packed paintings by Joseph Bertiers, a 28-year-old apprentice sign-painter and self-taught artist who has never traveled more than 50 miles from his birthplace in Nairobi, Kenya.

The sources for his incisively funny pictures are newspapers, radio broadcasts and a neighbor’s recent CNN hookup. Bertiers’ 17 oil-on-plywood panels at Ernie Wolfe Gallery outline an ambitious yet humble attempt to make sense of the complex world in which we live.

His humorous approach is perfectly suited to his subject: the madcap, media-fueled spectacle of international politics; corporate hypocrisy; larger-than-life-size disasters, and the fabulous debacles of overblown celebrities. His hilarious image of flying cows on drugs seems no more outlandish than the stories the news media regularly serve up as reality.

Bertiers’ medium-size paintings are at once raucous and poignant, naive and clear-sighted. His exhibition suggests that the gap between his renditions of the news and the official version is no greater than the distance between the mass media’s sensationalism and the lives of the ordinary people it supposedly serves.

Likewise, Bertiers’ imaginary visions of downtown Los Angeles, Tyson’s jail cell and Koresh’s living quarters invite us to wonder what our own pictures of downtown Nairobi, its police and political intrigues would look like if we took time to think about them or tried to paint their pictures.

* Ernie Wolfe Gallery, 1653 Sawtelle Blvd., (310) 478-2960, through Nov. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Muffled Terror: Nothing out of the ordinary takes place in Nic Nicosia’s black-and-white photographs. The wind stirs the leaves in a neighbor’s trees. A man loosens his tie, kicks up his feet and enjoys a cigar as his daughter tries on a Halloween mask. And a well-dressed housewife straightens her hair by catching her reflection in the blade of a butter knife.

Yet something dreadful takes shape in the 42-year-old artist’s darkly tinted pictures. A Barbie doll’s shadow looms monstrously over a sleeping child. A little girl stops a faceless man in the street by shining a flashlight on his chest. And a house of cards awaits completion by a potbellied retiree who has interrupted his solitary diversion to remove a wooden snake from his back porch.

Ten large-format prints at Linda Cathcart Gallery tempt one to think that Nicosia’s photographs capture the muffled terror embedded in modern domestic life, in the superficially perfect yet deeply skewed relations between husbands and wives, parents and children, our real selves and the roles we fall into, day after day after day.

The flip side of these meticulously staged and theatrically lit images is that the repressed violence and horror we find percolating in their shadows belongs to our own subconscious fantasies and projected desires.

Nicosia’s hypnotic one-act dramas compel our attention because they never let us off the hook. The best works he has made leave plenty of room for our imaginations, drawing us into the picture, where we watch our phobias and fantasies in action.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 1643 12th St., Santa Monica, (310) 392-8578, through Nov. 6. Open Saturday and Sunday.

Demanding Reckoning: Brutal energy collides with pictorial sophistication in the graffiti-inspired Pop apocalypse of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art. A condensed survey of some first-rate paintings, drawings and prints from 1980-86 at Fred Hoffman Gallery shows that when Basquiat was on, he was red-hot.

His scrawled, broken lists and fragmented pictures of bones, crowns and masks record the silent scream of a culture in its death throes and an identity being torn asunder. The question of just whose culture and which group’s identity he’s depicting fuels the controversy surrounding Basquiat’s powerful art.

Basquiat, a black artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, became an ‘80s symbol of urban primitivism, excess and decadence, supposedly cranking out paintings in a drug-induced frenzy while wearing Armani suits. His death five years ago ensured his status as the perfect raw material for the engines of myth-making.

The traveling Basquiat retrospective organized by New York’s Whitney Museum has the art world arguing over the merits of his paintings and their place in contemporary art history. This selective exhibition suggests that his best works will stand the test of time, that although his oeuvre is littered with flops and failures, it also includes many formally vigorous and emotionally raw works that demand reckoning.

* Fred Hoffman Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-1500, through Nov. 6. Closed Sunday and Monday.