ART REVIEWS : Lannan’s ‘Percept’: Intense, Rigorous

The exhibition “Percept/Image/Object” pinpoints the differences between seeing and knowing. At the Lannan Foundation, seeing isn’t believing, and knowing isn’t what we thought it was.

In the foyer, nine small lithographs by Gerhard Richter alert us to the fact that art doesn’t always obey the rules of the ordinary world. In one picture, the armature of a cube sits in a lawn chair. Closer inspection reveals that this geometric form behaves like a pretzel. Its straight edges defy the laws of perspective, twisting pictorial space and entangling us in perplexing illusions.

A mesmerizing installation by James Turrell plays out similar contradictions in three dimensions. In a dark chamber, a shimmering blue cube hovers in the opposite corner. As you approach it, the cube suddenly appears to be a rectangle cut out of the adjoining walls.

With unsettling effectiveness, Turrell seems to magically transform a solid volume into an empty void. Only when the shadow of your head eclipses his trick do you realize that the blue cube is simply light projected on walls painted a highly reflective titanium white.

Once you know the source of Turrell’s illusion, its capacity to stun diminishes. In the main gallery, Robert Irwin’s wall-mounted disk creates similar sensations, at first disrupting space with an elusive optical glitch, then fading into an exceptionally clever visual game.

The other artists abandon such illusionism. Jackie Winsor’s inscrutable cube, made of cheesecloth stretched taut over a wooden frame, sits vulnerably on the floor. Two abstract canvases by Ad Reinhardt demand painstaking concentration, rewarding the effort by drifting out of focus.

Charles Ray’s “Rotating Circle” turns perception into a physically threatening exercise. Perfectly set in the wall, the rapidly spinning disk is almost invisible. Its 3,500 revolutions per minute look like absolute stillness, but pack a walloping conceptual punch. If you touch the disk to prove that what you see is what you know, you risk real pain.

Perversely fascinating are the works by Tom Friedman. These include 3,000 garbage bags, stuffed one inside another; a stack of Lifesaver candies incrementally licked toward invisibility; a sheet of note-paper punched thousands of times with a pin and a hair-thin wire balanced on end. All of his pieces teeter maddeningly on the edge between utter inconsequentiality and awesome patience.

Two multi-panel paintings by John M. Miller are initially daunting. Their apparently inflexible patterns are too complex to apprehend rationally. They force intuition to the forefront of experience, momentarily aligning perception and cognition. Endlessly engaging, Miller’s dazzling works encapsulate the strongest impulses of the show.

This concise selection of paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings and installations from the Lannan collection includes works by eight artists rarely shown together, spans 40 years (or three generations), and draws from Los Angeles, New York and Germany. The confident mastery with which “Percept/Image/Object” was organized matches the intensity and rigor of its works. Both demand that we shake off lazy habits, abandon untested assumptions and experience our visual environment afresh.

Unfortunately, an exhibition like this won’t be organized again. Since the Lannan Foundation recently announced it has stopped collecting contemporary art, its holdings have been cut off from the dynamism and excitement of ongoing projects. Without an active connection to the present, the Lannan’s impressive collection will become a static, closed set of objects that can be rearranged but never reinvigorated.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave . , (310) 306-1004, through May 15. Closed Mondays.

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Emotional Appeal: A quick description of Catherine Howe’s paintings makes them sound like pat, politically correct exercises. However, the young New Yorker’s six large canvases at Kim Light Gallery are too odd to be dismissed so easily.

Five supple paintings in the main gallery depict attractive black women wearing summer dresses and casually standing before snazzy backdrops. These fields resemble soft versions of Clyfford Still’s hard, jarring abstractions from the 1950s.

In the back gallery, a lone white woman poses stiffly in a smarmy field of pastel smears. Her pinched expression conveys the distastefulness of over-studied spontaneity. Likewise, the background combines the vigorous brushwork of Willem de Kooning with the fluffiness of cotton candy.

To see Howe’s images exclusively in terms of art historical references is to miss much of their intrigue. Despite predominant interpretations, her paintings are not simplistic feminist send-ups of Abstract Expressionism. Howe’s skills as a painter save her work from being merely critical.

The best part of her art is the contradictory presence of its figures. They simultaneously possess the fleshiness of real bodies and the intangibility of memories. Emotional appeal--and its attendant risks--put an uncanny spin on Howe’s strangely intimate paintings.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through April 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Only the Ordinary: Ray Smith’s four multi-panel paintings and 10 small watercolors at Ruth Bloom Gallery fail to live up to the promise of his earlier hallucinatory pictures.

The 34-year-old Texas-born artist was raised in Mexico and now splits his time between New York and Cuernavaca. He has either settled into a boring, formulaic phase of his career or shipped leftovers to his first solo show in Los Angeles, presumably saving better works for more important exhibitions.

Although the standard themes of Surrealism are present in Smith’s art, they seem to be heartlessly put through their paces. Sexual desire, bodily disgust, subconscious associations and fantastic animal transformations still occur, but with too much control to resonate.

Smith’s current allusions lack the hilarious unpredictability that sometimes animates his paintings. His wildly imaginative cast of characters has shrunk to include only ordinary people and realistic ducks, fish, frogs and squid.

Smith typically depicts colorful amphibians clinging to the naked bodies of slender women. He also renders fully clothed men whose heads are covered by octopi or shellfish. The largest painting portrays his son in a bathtub full of ducks.

Overly literal, these lifeless pictures eliminate the Sphinx-like enigma that once made Smith’s work compelling. Too little room is left for psychological ambivalence or mystery.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through April 9. Closed Mondays.

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Dynamic Cycle: Fantastic animals stare at their mirror images in Rodrigo Pimentel’s new paintings on canvas and paper. Titled “Reflections,” the Mexican artist’s 14 diptychs at Iturralde Gallery are bolder and more direct than his earlier, abstractly patterned works.

Each pair of paintings consists of a vibrantly colored creature juxtaposed to its double. The reversed versions are painted as if they were bathed in the light of the moon. Shimmering silvers, bluish grays and shadowy whites contrast to the hot, circus colors of their daytime counterparts.

In Pimentel’s menagerie, night is never opposed to day, nor is good inflexibly set against evil. Both play off one another, creating a dynamic cycle. Life and death, joy and suffering, violence and love are subsumed in a complex, ongoing process.

Like pictures in children’s story-books, Pimentel’s paintings describe an enchanted, magical world. Fierce beasts look more amiable than threatening. With easy-to-understand simplicity, they embody human sentiments and convey profound wisdom.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through April 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.