ART REVIEW : Miroslaw Balka Takes Society’s Temperature : The Polish artist--considered the foremost Eastern European sculptor of his generation--is showcased at the Lannan Foundation.

The most captivating element in Miroslaw Balka’s spare and elegant installation of poetically evocative sculptures and drawings at the Lannan Foundation is also the most paradoxical: an empty corridor at the entrance. Rarely does so little speak with so much eloquence.

Designed by the artist, the passage is a kind of sensual decompression chamber. Halfway up the walls, which reach 12 1/2 feet in height, a mildly perfumed “wainscoting” has been applied, by troweling on a thin coating of Polish household soap dissolved in water.

Visually, the soft, smooth, ocher-colored coating of soap reads as a waxy membrane or as aged, translucent skin. Bits of dust and dirt are embedded in the soap-skin, like freckles or blemishes in flesh. Sometimes, small insects have been trapped, as if in amber. “Soap Corridor” is a space in which architecture and the evocation of past life unobtrusively share an intimate acquaintance.

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The height of the soapy surface applied to surrounding walls has been determined by the artist’s height, personalizing the space by making it a reflection of human measure. You may not know that Balka’s own stature has been used as the measuring device, but relative to the full height of the corridor and of the even taller room through which it passes, the surrounding skin plainly establishes a humanizing dimension.

The corridor also works to effectively slow down your eye and mind in passing from the world of random encounters outside the gallery into the highly focused arena you are about to enter. “Soap Corridor” is a cleansing space.

Miroslaw Balka (pronounced MIR-o-swav BOWK-uh ) is a 36-year-old Polish artist who was born and still lives in Warsaw. Since the final rust-out of the Iron Curtain, he has shown his sculpture in other European and American cities, including a 1991 solo exhibition at Burnett Miller Gallery in Los Angeles (his first in the United States). With his success last year representing Poland in its national pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale, Balka is generally considered the foremost sculptor of his generation to have emerged in Eastern Europe.

Except for the drawings, the present installation, acquired by the Lannan, is the one Balka showed in Venice. The collective ensemble is titled “37.1 (Cont.),” a number that refers to the Celsius temperature at which fever begins in the human body.

Conversely, of course, it’s also the temperature at which fever breaks. With Balka, the fragile threshold between imminent catastrophe and impending normalcy always gives a clear view in both directions. Neither ever arrives.

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As suggested by the beautifully simple corridor, made with the humblest of materials, Balka’s Minimalist-looking sculptures are composed from ordinary architectural stuff: rusting steel; cheap black-and-white terrazzo flooring; rough carpet; ash from a stove. The shape and surface articulation of two pieces that hug the floor and one that hangs flat against the wall recall a floor plan describing a small room.

In one floor sculpture, you look at the terrazzo from above; in another, you see its unfinished side from below--as if you have been buried beneath it. The third time the floor has been upended against the wall. The topsy-turviness suggests wrenching disorder held in suspension, like holding your breath in the face of the unknown.

Elsewhere, two rectangular terrazzo slabs lie side by side and low to the floor, on small beds of steel covered with felt. Lay a hand on the terrazzo and it is warm--37.1 C, to be precise, heated by cables embedded inside. The slabs are part domestic bed, site of raging fever dreams, and part tomb, in which the corpse is not yet cold.

Plainly the tenor of Balka’s “37.1 (Cont.)” is informed by the remarkable developments that have reverberated through Polish society in the last decade or so; but his sculpture, in its domestic and highly individuated forms, encounters the social world through a scrim of experience that is intimate, personal and inward-looking. Its materials and sensibility build on the hugely influential precedent of the late German artist Joseph Beuys but without Beuys’ globally minded sense of dramatic pretense.

The final galleries of the show contain wall cases filled with nearly 200 charred fragments of paper. The crumbling fragments, burned in a studio fire last fall, are edged in smoky brown.

Most are drawings that date from 1984 to 1992--one is a 1990 drawing made by Balka’s young daughter. The rest are school items--pages from an out-of-date atlas of Poland and bits of English lessons, each of which is a kind of map--one to socially organized landscape, one to alien language.

In their way, the blackened drawings and maps, purposefully entombed in museum cases, speak to human tenacity and fragility in a manner every bit as provocative as the more elaborate sculptures. Balka’s is not an art that grabs you by the lapels but that whispers in your ear instead.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., (310) 306-1004, through Sept. 11. Closed Mondays.