ART REVIEWS : Maurizio Pellegrin’s Constellations of Long-Lost Love

Love, loss and nostalgia permeate Maurizio Pellegrin’s elegant arrangements of faded photographs, old clothes and antique odds and ends that seem to have been gathered from a deceased relative’s attic. Like mute poems, the Italian-born artist’s evocative constellations resonate with suggestiveness without explicitly revealing their meanings.

A sense of mystery is essential to the 37-year-old’s tenderly romantic art. Made from humble materials, intimate mementos and anonymous souvenirs, his works have the presence of shrines to long-gone romances, broken-off affairs and infatuations that were never consummated nor forgotten. The five, multipart pieces at Mark Moore Gallery seem to savor cherished memories of past intrigues and to relish fantasies of how the present might be different if previous situations had unfolded differently.

“Selective Corners,” the exhibition’s centerpiece, consists of a loose grid of clothing patterns push-pinned to the wall and punctuated by a sexy black dress and several oval frames cloaked in black fabric. “Your Summer” juxtaposes similar components with an old photograph of a sunbathing woman, a beach chair, a wooden vice and three paperbacks, all mounted on a full-size set of bedsprings.

“Amore Nell’ Officina” is Pellegrin’s least-sentimental and most-intriguing piece. Its leopard-skin jacket, printed inventories and boxes of valves, bearings and bolts suggest an affection for the impersonal mechanics of attraction, rather than the focused yearnings for an absent, fantasized partner. Abstract, free-flowing desire takes precedence over the object to which it is usually attached and restricted.

When Pellegrin’s pieces indulge an overly personal poetry, they risk being little more than self-involved illustrations. When his art maintains its light-handed irony and magical obscurity, it triggers a potentially wide range of memories, leaving its viewers with more paths to follow and tales to spin.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3831, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Touchable Playthings: Franz West’s seven medium-size sculptures at Burnett Miller Gallery are nothing more (and nothing less) than dumb lumps of stuff. Resting on homemade, gauze-wrapped pedestals with about as much dignity as TV cartoons, these awkward, clotted wads of inanimate matter intend to be stupid.

Slathered with dripping coats of viscous and sickly pastels, the Viennese artist’s mildly ugly pieces attack the idea of good taste with playfully mock irreverence. They undercut ostentation by short-circuiting cerebral approaches to art.

Their enemy is language, whose intrinsic sophistication is often accompanied by undue objectification and alienation. In place of thin ideas and empty concepts, West’s handcrafted blobs of plaster, papier-mache and gauze offer us hands-on experiences of inarticulate, grade-school materials.

You’re meant to touch, juggle and fondle his crudely constructed playthings, as a tongue-in-cheek “instructional” videotape demonstrates. Talking about his art usually sounds pretentious and out of touch.

Like clumps of mud packed together by some uncoordinated child-god, West’s works propose that each of us get in touch with the child within. They are simultaneously sincere and smart-alecky. We don’t know if we should trust the simple-minded tactility they present, or laugh at ourselves for immediately trying to analyze and intellectualize our simplest experiences.

The pleasures West’s sculptures provide wear thin pretty quickly. Although his messy work is most effective when it makes fun of itself, along with the stuffiness that surrounds the arts, it is too dependent on the snobbery of squeaky-clean, white-walled galleries. Like the class clown, his art would rather smart off in school than risk cutting class.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757, through Jan. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Antiseptic Constructions: Elizabeth Gutierrez’s polished metal sculptures sit on the floor, hang from the ceiling and protrude from the walls of the Jan Baum Gallery, transforming its back room into a cross between a machine-shop and a designer boutique. Solidly crafted and stylishly slick, the young, L.A.-based artist’s six compact constructions competently cover well-traveled terrain without pushing very hard at its boundaries.

Her stainless steel, aluminum, rubber and velvet works are abstract hybrids of mechanical materials and organic forms. One resembles a large, steel peanut. Mounted low on the wall, it also recalls those coin-operated shoe-polishing machines sometimes found near the restrooms of hotels and motels.

Another piece looks like an industrial-strength towel dispenser designed for astronauts or masochists. Where the cloth roll should hang, Gutierrez has placed a continuous strip of skin-like black rubber.

Other sculptures combine references to the human circulatory system and motorcycle exhaust pipes; to crushed velvet cushions and insect cocoons; to protective helmets and formal hairdos, or to padded cells and patterned fabrics.

Although associations with the human body are meant to infuse Gutierrez’s objects with flesh-and-blood vitality, her antiseptic art leaves us cold. More calculated than inspired, it is too safe and conventional to transform references and metaphors into gripping, visceral experiences.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Dec. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.