Art Reviews : Patrick Nickell’s Stirring Mind Games

At Kohn Turner Gallery, the pleasures of Patrick Nickell’s work elude discrete categories. These include the simple satisfaction of a job well done, the high of euphoria, the mental gymnastics occasioned by plunging into esoterica and the wicked pride of the kid whose smarts lie in his penchant for playing dumb.

What can one do with small strips of corrugated cardboard, pieces of sheer plastic wrap and odd lengths of string? Nickell creates a roomful of small-scale, down-market, low-tech, no-gloss sculptures.

These three-dimensional agglomerations of mismatched geometric forms (circles, squares and triangles) are tied up with string and swaddled in plastic only to be suspended--vertiginously, even cruelly--from the wall and from one another.

Even more contrary is their complexity. Defying the mundaneness of their materials, these objects play all manner of mind games, masquerading as the cacophonous music of truncated symphonies, illegible chemical formula or the abstruse structures of microorganisms. Yet they remain firmly abstract, taking their place within the history of Modernist abstraction, mixing up the Minimal and Baroque strains whose oscillation has long characterized that history.

With the larger pieces, made of sheet metal and finely meshed screen, Nickell does a bit of unnecessary grandstanding, openly referring to any number of 20th-Century masters: Brancusi, Benglis, Tuttle, Hesse. The title of at least one cardboard work refers to David Smith; yet the least convincing of these constructions succumb to the literalist impulse that was Smith’s undoing.

One such sculpture mimics the repetitive brush strokes of so-called painterly realism. Another configures a loose-limbed marionette whose anthropomorphism halts all playfulness dead in its tracks. Yet in Nickell’s best work, the play is the thing. When he puts aside his bid for posterity (which turns out to be self-fulfilling anyway), it is wonderful to watch him exult in possibilities.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through Oct. 22. Closed Sunday, Monday.

Classic Memory: “Remember-entering,” John Souza’s installation at Sue Spaid Fine Arts, suggests that the case for the artist’s eccentricity has been vastly overstated. Appearances aside--and we’re talking leather wristbands and other S/M paraphernalia, light fixtures propped on wheels like toy trains, Greek columns dangling midair from dime-store hooks, and a beige- and white-striped cabana off the beach at Deauville circa 1922--this is a rather classical show.

From Souza we might have expected a neo-Pop extravaganza, chaotic razzle-dazzle and sinister wit. Here, however, the presentation is balanced and orderly. The theme is memory’s affair with desire, and the tone is elegiacal.

Souza dims the lights and fills the gallery with eight portal-cum-coffins. Each is propped against the wall, heavily customized and saddled with a title whose poetry is discreetly absurd.

“Past the Moat, the Drip Gate and Iron Doors, the Intruder Advanced Toward the Castle’s Murder Hole and Ultimate Terror,” is a Gothic fantasy, festooned with cheap silver chains and flickering electric lights. “We Provisioned Our King for His Journey Into the Next World and Slowly Sealed the Tomb for all Centuries” pictures King Tut’s resting place as it might appear in an MGM musical, a bit heavy on the Art Deco flourishes.

If Souza broaches the classical notion of death as passage, it is only to emphasize the ersatz nature of the rituals and artifacts surrounding it. Perhaps he’s suggesting that our culture’s romance with death is played out. Mourning has become a matter of choosing the right hardware, and classicism just another name for an anti-romantic impulse.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Sept. 30. Closed Monday, Tuesday.

What’s Real: At Mark Moore Gallery, Bruce Richards demonstrates the recalcitrant allure of hyper-realism. Just a few strokes shy of trompe-l’oeil , Richards’ painstakingly rendered work is masterful though decidedly ironic about the possibilities of mastering anything, much less something as slippery as an image.

In his new work, collectively entitled, “Formal Couples,” Richards inverts familiar cliches. If clothes are said to make the man, Richards shows us how they might unmake him--and his female counterpart as well.

Pairs of paintings on paper depict the accouterments of wealth. The first of each pair boasts a bow tie and a row of jeweled shirt-studs, the second an elaborate necklace of diamonds, emeralds or rubies.

These luxury items are deceptive. They display a stubborn sameness, advertising not wealth but the poverty of imagination engendered at the highest levels of consumption. Like the grin of the disembodied Cheshire cat, they bespeak absence rather than presence.

Thus the high-ticket trinkets offer an oblique comment upon Richards’ own style, whose mesmerizing wealth of detail and insistent fullness promises access to reality that an image can of course never provide. Piling paradox on top of irony, Richards offers a seductive but unsettling head trip.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Oct. 15. Closed Sunday, Monday.