Art Reviews : Ynez Johnston’s Mythical Flights of Fancy

Ynez Johnston’s fanciful prints and colorful paintings look like maps of fantastic lands. Her bronze and wood sculptures, made in collaboration with her husband, poet John Berry, resemble mythical beasts that might transport passengers to these strange locations.

At Tobey C. Moss Gallery, more than 70 etchings, aquatints, woodcuts and lithographs from 1948-84 take viewers on whirlwind tours that include imaginary visits to Altamira cave paintings, Mayan stone carvings, Chinese calligraphic scrolls, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Tibetan wall hangings, Peruvian textiles, Cherokee tepee designs, Aboriginal sand paintings and bark drawings, as well as the paintings of Paul Klee, Jean Miro and Jean Dubuffet.

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At Tortue Gallery, more than 45 recent paintings, drawings and sculptures bolster the power of Johnston’s detailed prints, providing bold jolts of bright color and three-dimensional solidity.

But the only exotic territory her art actually visits is in Johnston’s playful imagination. The pictographic symbols in the 73-year-old, L.A.-based artist’s work are thoroughly filtered through her own sensibility. They tell us less about the cultures from which they originate and more about Johnston’s unique vision.

Her whimsical, inventive art describes a highly personal yet readily accessible world in which plants, animals, humans, machines and deities are valued equally. Architecture and geography also belong to this fluid continuum.

Every element in Johnston’s jam-packed images seems to be made of the same animate substance. Tiny creatures and giant beasts are no more vital than rocks or buildings, mountains or islands. Abstract lines, decorative patterns and rich textures are similarly driven by a restless energy.

It’s often impossible to know what you see when you look at these hallucinatory images. You just have to sense things, ceding rational control to follow fleeting intuitions. Fortunately, Johnston endows every inch of her delightful pictures with the potential to contribute to any number of wildly open-ended narratives.

* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (213) 933-5523, through May 28. Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8878, through June 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. When Opposites Attract: A struggle between beauty and ugliness percolates beneath the clotted surfaces of Roger Herman’s 16 moderately scaled paintings at Ace Gallery. Transitional in the best sense of the term, these predominantly abstract canvases preserve key elements of earlier works while groping around to discover an unanticipated pictorial order.

Herman’s new paintings maintain much of the manic visual energy that animated his all-over, jigsaw-puzzle compositions from four years ago. They also attest to his continued interest in paint’s juicy fluidity, previously demonstrated by a series of gigantic--sometimes overblown--blue paintings exhibited two years ago at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

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The most intriguing aspect of Herman’s recent work is its flirtation with representation, a mode the L.A.-based artist has not approached since his huge woodcuts from the late ‘80s.

It is significant that flowers appear only in Herman’s smallest new paintings, three pictures of poppies that look more like exuberant explosions of color than actual bouquets. Such decorative flourishes have, in the past, been thought of as the enemy of painting, too silly and frivolous to be taken seriously.

As a group, Herman’s new paintings try to fuse prettiness with vigor. Scaled back from his past series, they struggle and stutter to articulate repressed connections between beauty and aggression, making a mess of restrictive categories rather than accepting worn-out ideas.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through May. Closed Sundays and Mondays.