ART Reviews : Posada’s Political Passion

Dancing skeletons, ruthless bandits, serene saints and rapacious politicians populate the raucous, multifaceted world depicted in the cheap broadsheets by Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) at Bryce Bannatyne Gallery. Before photography satisfied (and stimulated) modern society’s appetite for sensational images of the news, Posada’s prints illustrated stories, conveyed the gory details of natural disasters and outlined the back-stabbing viciousness of frontier politics.

His etchings, engravings and occasional woodblocks also editorialized freely. Some were intended for poor Native Americans and Mexicans who could not read, others were aimed at the literate. Both types regularly ridiculed the hypocrisy and greed of the privileged classes.

Posada was a working-class artisan trained in the time-consuming process of lithography. After moving to Mexico City in 1888, he turned to a little-known process of zinc etching that allowed him to turn plates out in less than an hour. Speed was essential to keep up with fast-breaking news stories.

Posada’s popularity grew as his topical, timely prints appeared in newspapers, chapbooks and satirical weekly journals. He produced an estimated 15,000 images, many generic enough to be re-used whenever a publisher needed to illustrate another robbery, murder or government scandal.

If anything unifies Posada’s prodigious output, it’s the restless, ribald humor of his ubiquitous calaveras , or skeleton caricatures. He did not invent these playful Day of the Dead characters, in which human foibles look petty in contrast to the mortality everyone shares, but his graphics popularized them.

After Posada’s death, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco claimed him as an artistic forebear. The muralists saw, in his mass-produced images for non-elite audiences, a compatriot in their revolutionary struggle for a broad-based art that would define the needs and aspirations of a people.

Yet, it’s impossible to read a consistent political position in Posada’s prints. He poked fun at all strata of society, mocking narrow-mindedness wherever it appeared.

Also, many of the papers in which Posada’s work was published were run by the government and subject to strict censorship. The politics of some of his pictures probably represents a balance between his own opinions and those of his bosses.

He also appears to have been much more concerned with traditional religion than the muralists. A portrayal of Our Lady of Guadalupe is among his most elaborate prints.

* Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, 2439 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-9668, through June 18. Closed Mondays. * Empty Elegance: In the last five years, Claudia Matzko has made an impressive number of sculptures whose delicate beauty often takes your breath away. Ten new pieces at Angles Gallery disappoint because they do not live up to her earlier achievements.

In the past, Matzko fashioned nearly invisible works out of map tacks, monofilament, sheets of glass, traces of evaporated water and cast shadows. Exceptionally fragile, these meticulously installed materials almost disappeared into their surroundings.

Just before vanishing, however, they sent a sensual quiver of energy through your body’s perceptual machinery, stimulating your eyes, resonating in your brain and echoing in your memory. Matzko’s best sculptures seemed to put viewers in touch with intangibility itself.

Her precise art, which often had the presence of a science experiment, stripped abstraction of its spiritual residue, focusing instead on the poetry of empirical experience. Her new work replaces this eloquence with empty elegance.

Fabricated from more substantial materials, such as tooled steel, cast bronze, industrial-strength electronics, broken musical instruments and gallons of mineral oil, it lacks the charge of previous pieces and seems static, even clunky by comparison.

A stadium light bulb whose cord is too short to reach the nearest socket has been suspended from the wall at eye level. If it were plugged in, it would blind you.

On the opposite wall, a series of hinges runs from the floor to the ceiling. Although they’re meant to suggest that the wall can fold back, this idea never takes on physical force: The hinges merely look like a zipper or set of toy train tracks affixed to the wall.

Matzko’s new sculptures bypass your eyes to appeal directly to your mind. They don’t explore the activity of looking, but elide sensory experience in favor of engaging the imagination and triggering abstract associations.

Without its astute scrutiny of perception, Matzko’s art loses its individuality and power.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through June 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. * Intimate Anonymity: Dan McCleary lures viewers into his images by keeping himself out of the picture. At Kohn Turner Gallery, poignancy stirs just beneath the surfaces of paintings, drawings and photographs that patiently probe the territory where intimacy meets anonymity.

The best painting is also the biggest. It depicts a woman waiting for an usher to tear her movie ticket. Nostalgia and romance are palpable in this seemingly insignificant ritual.

Meaning resides in the details. The woman, whose back faces the viewer, stands unusually close to the usher. The tilt of her head and the angle of her eye suggest that she’s giving him a pretty good looking over. His downward glance could be a bashful attempt to keep some distance between himself and her casual intrusiveness. Or, he might just be bored by his job and completely unaware of her gaze.

McCleary’s picture intimates that psychological worlds separate people whose bodies practically touch. Two other paintings, of a couple dancing and another lying on a bed, give vivid form to the emotional distance that can drift between individuals. The small still-lifes and portraits are less captivating but still possess some of the understated alienation of McCleary’s more ambitious works. Ten color photographs serve as studies or sketches, freezing saleswomen at a cosmetic counter, a stranger at a bus stop, a couple hugging and two men absorbed in conversation.

Precedents for McCleary’s paintings include Edward Hopper’s stark depictions of urban isolation, Alex Katz’s chilling portrayals of high-class vacuousness and Eric Fischl’s uneasy images of suburban sexuality. More placid, restrained and subdued than these, McCleary’s art is suffused by a touch of warmth, suggesting that withdrawal and distance provide their own security and comfort.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through June 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays. * Natural Progression: At Kiyo Higashi Gallery, a pair of previously unexhibited collages and five rarely seen paintings from the early 1960s neatly trace the rapid, step-by-step progression that led to Larry Bell’s signature glass cubes, which secured his reputation as a founding member of the Light and Space group.

Since 1963, Bell has worked often with cubes, varying the size of his sculptures, refining his high-tech craftsmanship and playing with the ways different types of vacuum-coated glass catch and reflect light.

To viewers familiar only with the cubes that have become synonymous with Bell’s name, his early shaped canvases and collages come as a surprise. In retrospect, they make perfect sense. This small, well-selected survey concisely illustrates Bell’s early movement away from the flatness of abstract painting and toward the three-dimensionality of actual space.

In the collages, bits of broken glass look like charming little pictures of clear skies. In the flat, hard-edged acrylic paintings, positive and negative space flip back and forth as silhouettes of cubes seem to describe volumes or merely outline six-sided shapes.

Bell’s biggest jump occurs in “Ghost Box,” a shaped painting that frames a central window of mirrored and sand-blasted sheets of glass. From here, it’s easy to see where the cubes came from.

They’re basically paintings that have been taken off the wall and had their stretcher bars deepened until they became armatures for the cubes. This taut exhibition captures the youthful, experimental component of Bell’s oeuvre , when discovery outweighed refinement and loose ends had not been eliminated in favor of highly focused reductions.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through July 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.